The stranger listened abstractedly at first; but afterward he appeared to reflect profoundly for several minutes. "Your lot is wretched, old man," said he at length: "if you live a few years longer, that period must be passed in solitude and cheerlessness:--if you suddenly fall ill you must die the lingering death of famine, without a soul to place a morsel of food, or the cooling cup to your lips; and when you shall be no more, who will follow you to the grave? There are no habitations nigh; the nearest village is half-a-day's journey distant; and ere the peasants of that hamlet, or some passing traveler, might discover that the inmate of this hut had breathed his last, the wolves from the forest would have entered and mangled your corpse." "Talk not thus!" cried the old man, with a visible shudder; then darting a half-terrified, half-curious glance at his guest, he said, "but who are you that speak in this awful strain--this warning voice?" Again the thunder rolled, with crashing sound, above the cottage; and once more the wind swept by, laden, as it seemed, with the shrieks and groans of human beings in the agonies of death. The stranger maintained a certain degree of composure only by means of a desperate effort, but he could not altogether subdue a wild flashing of the eyes and a ghastly change of the countenance--signs of a profoundly felt terror. "Again I say, ask me not who I am!" he exclaimed, when the thunder and the gust had passed. "My soul recoils from the bare idea of pronouncing my own accursed name! But--unhappy as you see me--crushed, overwhelmed with deep affliction as you behold me--anxious, but unable to repent for the past as I am, and filled with appalling dread for the future as I now proclaim myself to be, still is my power far, far beyond that limit which hems mortal energies within so small a sphere. Speak, old man--wouldst thou change thy condition? For to me--and to me alone of all human beings--belongs the means of giving thee new life--of bestowing upon thee the vigor of youth, of rendering that stooping form upright and strong, of restoring fire to those glazing eyes, and beauty to that wrinkled, sunken, withered countenance--of endowing thee, in a word, with a fresh tenure of existence and making that existence sweet by the aid of treasures so vast that no extravagance can dissipate them!" A strong though indefinite dread assailed the old man as this astounding proffer was rapidly opened, in all its alluring details, to his mind;--and various images of terror presented themselves to his imagination;--but these feelings were almost immediately dominated by a wild and ardent hope, which became the more attractive and exciting in proportion as a rapid glance at his helpless, wretched, deserted condition led him to survey the contrast between what he then was, and what, if the stranger spoke truly, he might so soon become. The stranger saw that he had made the desired impression; and he continued thus: