No sooner had he said these words than the death‐like hue of his cheek brightened into a smile of more than human promise. The small torch that he held sent forth a radiance, by which suddenly the whole surface of the desert was illuminated, even to the far horizon’s edge, along whose line were now seen gardens, palaces, and spires, all bright and golden, like the architecture of the clouds at sunset. Sweet music, too, was heard every where, floating around, and, from all sides, such varieties of splendour poured, that, with the excess both of harmony and of light, I woke. That infidels should be superstitious is an anomaly neither unusual nor strange. A belief in superhuman agency seems natural and necessary to the mind; and, if not suffered to flow in the obvious channels, it will find a vent in some other. Hence, many who have doubted the existence of a God, have yet implicitly placed themselves under the patronage of Fate or the stars. Much the same inconsistency I was conscious of in my own feelings. Though rejecting all belief in a Divine Providence, I had yet a faith in dreams, that all my philosophy could not conquer. Nor was experience wanting to confirm me in my delusion; for, by some of those accidental coincidences, which make the fortune of soothsayers and prophets, dreams, more than once, had been to me Oracles, truer far than oak, Or dove, or tripod, ever spoke. It was not wonderful, therefore, that the vision of that night, touching, as it did, a chord so ready to vibrate, should have affected me with more than ordinary power, and sunk deeper into my memory with every effort I made to forget it. In vain did I mock at my own weakness;—such self‐ derision is seldom sincere. In vain did I pursue my accustomed pleasures. Their zest was, as usual, for ever new; but still came the saddening consciousness of mortality, and, with it, the recollection of this visionary promise, to which my fancy, in defiance of my reason, still clung. Sometimes indulging in reveries, that were little else than a continuation of my dream, I even contemplated the possible existence of some secret, by which youth might be, if not perpetuated, at least prolonged, and that dreadful vicinity of death, within whose circle love pines and pleasure sickens, might be for a while averted. “Who knows,” I would ask, “but that in Egypt, that land of wonders, where Mystery hath yet unfolded but half her treasures,—where so many dark secrets of the antediluvian world still remain, undeciphered, upon the pillars of Seth—who knows but some charm, some amulet, may lie hid, whose discovery, as this phantom hath promised, but waits my coming—some compound of the same pure atoms, that scintillate in the eternal stars, and whose infusion into the frame of man might make him, too, fadeless and immortal!”