_Mr. Welson_ (laughing). “There now, you have tempted me to play with your superstitions, or rather I have been tempted. Be content for the present, and in time all will be revealed to you in freedom from supernatural agency.” With this parting admonition Mr. Welson entered the house. The padre, after he had sufficiently recovered the use of his faculties, uttered in self-defense an abjuring protest of two Marias, kissing in addenda the beads and cross with transubstantial desire for their seal of effectual grace, then soliloquized: “They can’t convince me that they are not leagued with the spirit of darkness; and if I live to see the morrow’s sun I’ll shake the dust,—well, if they had any,—off the soles of my feet, if I am obliged to traverse the paths of the wilderness that separates me from civilization alone.” As if to put his intention into immediate execution he walked rapidly down the avenue of the latifundium and out of the gate; but when skirting the copse of the temple grove he met the Heraclean herdsmen and their wives. Their jocund mirth, sportive with songs and gladness, withdrew his thoughts from self by their grateful tokens of affection bestowed in the full outflow of joyful greeting, which caused him to forget his impressions of their enchantment from supernatural agency, and he was soon engaged, with Manatitlan aid, in the laughing exchange of Latin and English terms of idiomatic phrase. On his return to the quarters of the corps suspicion had been banished from his memory; but his doubts and fears were again revived, when on entering the dining- room he encountered the same mysterious impression of a communion with the presence of unseen spirits. The entrance of Dr. Baāhar, with the buzz and genealogical curators of sound, dispelled the influence, but they, as well as the padre, had questioned the source of its power. After the evening meal the padre sought the opportunity of renewing his petition for permission to depart in the morning; anointing it with grateful acknowledgments for their kindness to him personally, while in the style of exorcism he urged the necessity with the quotation, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” The effect of this appeal, for instinctive self-preservation, was so comical in its misplaced application that the four were obliged to join the auriculars in giving gleeful vent to their mirth; this, however, was as suddenly checked, when their supposed derisive lack of sympathy affected the padre to the extent of producing tears. Unable to restrain his contempt for the selfimposed shallowness of the padre’s perception, Mr. Welson,—under the auricular direction of Corycæus, the familiar who attended him on his journey,—gave a final touch to his victim’s superstitious fears, by asking: “Did your conscience or soul find themselves in a purer atmosphere, or in less suspicious companionship, when subjected by Fraile Gallagato to the sacramental spirits of a