against my forehead, and asked me 'if I were ill, and hence had left the temple,' I was overcome with her kindness; and when the reflection forced itself upon me that I could no more call her mother, or be entitled to these acts of maternal solicitude, I gave way to the strong current of emotion, and fell upon her shoulder, weeping as heartily as she had seen me weep when lying in the little ark a helpless infant. "During this brief moment, a suspicion flashed across my mind, that the magicians might have produced this as a part of my trial as a prince;--that it was not real, but that by their wonderful arts of magic they had made it appear so to my vision. I seized upon this idea, as a man drowning in the Nile grasps at a floating flower. "'Mother,' I said, 'I am ill. I am also very sorrowful!' "'The tasks and toils of thy initiation, my son, have been too great for thee. Thy face is haggard and thy looks unnatural. What is thy sorrow?' "'I have had a vision, or what was like a dream, my mother. I saw an infant, in this vision, before me, placed in an ark, and set adrift upon the Nile. Lo, after being borne by the current some ways, it was espied by a princess who was bathing, whose maids, at her command, brought it to her. It contained a circumcised Hebrew child. The princess, being childless, adopted it, and educated it, and declared it to be her son. She placed him next to her in the kingdom, and was about to resign to him the crown, when--' "Here my mother, whose face I had earnestly regarded, became pale and trembled all over. She seized my hands and gasped-- "'Tell me, Remeses, tell me, was this a dream, or hast thou heard it?' "'I saw it, my mother, in a vision, in the subterranean chamber of the pyramids. It was one of those scenes of magic which the arts of the magi know how to produce.' "'Dost thou believe it?' she cried. "'Is it not thy _secret_, O my mother, which Prince Mœris shares with thee? Am I not right? Does not that Hebrew child,' I cried, rising, 'now stand before thee?' "She shrieked, and fell insensible!