him to go forth and pray for a woman who was grievously tormented. The Rabbi, ever awake to the call of human sorrow, rose from his knees, girt his robe round him, and went forth. The messenger led him to a building deep in the forest that grew on the south side of the hill of Hebron. The building had more the look of the palace of one of the princes of Israel than of a private dwelling. But if its exterior struck the gaze of the Rabbi, its apartments excited his astonishment. He passed through a succession of halls worthy of the days of the first Herod, when Jerusalem raised her head again after the ruin of Antiochus, when her long civil wars were past, and she had become once more the most magnificent city of the eastern world. Marble columns, silken veils suspended from the capitals of the pillars, tissues wrought with the embroidery of Sidon, and coloured with the incomparable dyes of Casarea, vases of Armenian crystal, and tables of Grecian mosaic, filled chambers, in which were trains of attendants of every climate, Ethiopian, Indian, Persian, and Greek, all habited in the richest dresses. All that met the eye wore an air of the most sumptuous and habitual magnificence. The Rabbi, however, had but a short time for wonder, before he was summoned to the chamber of the sick person. But all the costliness that he had seen before was eclipsed by the singular brilliancy of this apartment; it was small, and evidently contrived for the secluded hours of an individual; but every thing was sumptuous, all gold or pearl, amber or lapislazuli. And in the midst of this pomp, reclined, half sitting, half lying, on huge pillows of Shiraz silk, a female, whose beauty, in all the languor of pain, riveted even the ancient eye of the pious Rabbi. The sufferer was young; but the flush that from time to time broke across her countenance, and then left it to the paleness of the grave, shewed that she was on the verge of the tomb. The Rabbi was famous for his knowledge of herbs and minerals, and he offered her some of those medicaments which he had found useful in arresting the progress of decay. The dying beauty thanked him, and said

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in a faint voice that she had implored his coming, not to be cured of a disease which she knew to be fatal, but to disburden her mind of a secret which had already hung heavy on her, and which must extinguish her existence before the morn. The Rabbi, on hearing this, besought her to make him the depositary of her sorrow, if he could serve her; but if he could not, forbade her to tell him what might hang darkly on the memory of a man of Israel. I am the daughter,' said she, of your friend the Rabbi Ben Bechai, whose memory be blessed, but the widow of a prince, the descendant of Ishmael. You see the riches in this house; but they are not the riches of the sons of the Desert. They were desperately gained, bitterly enjoyed, and now they are repented of when it is too late.' As the lovely being spoke, her countenance changed; she suddenly writhed and tossed with pain, and in her agony cried out words that pierced the holy man's ears with terror. He cast his eyes on the ground, and prayed, and was strengthened. But when he looked up again, an extraordinary change had come upon the woman's countenance. Its paleness

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was gone, her cheeks were burning, her hollow eyes were darting strange light; her lips, which had been thin and faded as the falling leaf, were full, crimson, and quivering with wild passion and magic energy. The Rabbi could not believe that he saw the dying woman by whose side he had so lately knelt, in the fierce and bold, yet still beautiful creature, that now gazed full and fearless upon him. You see me now,' said she, with surprise; but these are the common changes of my suffering. The deadly disease that is sinking me to the dust, thus varies its torment hour by hour; but I must submit and suffer.' The Rabbi knew by those words that the woman was tormented with an evil spirit. Upon this he sent for a famous unction, which had been handed down to him from his ancestor the Rabbi Joseph, who had been physician to King Herod the Great, and had exorcised the evil spirit out of the dying king. On its being brought, he anointed the forehead of the woman, her eyes, and the

tips of her fingers. He then made a fire of citron wood and cinnamon, and threw on it incense. As the smoke arose, he bowed her head gently over it, that she might imbibe the odour in her nostrils, which was an established way of expelling the evil spirit.

his dwelling in the tombs. He scoffed at my complaints of ill fortune, and swore to place me once again at the height of my wishes, if I would be ready at his call at the end of a hundred years. I could have then drunk fire and blood in my fury against mankind, and my thirst of possession. I swore to be his, and prepared to begin my hundred years of enjoyment.

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"The woman's countenance now changed again, it was once more pale with pain, and she cried out in her torment; at length in strong agony she uttered many words. But the Rabbi perceived, from her fixed eyes and motionless lips, that it was the spirit within her that spoke the words. It said, Why am I to be disturbed with anointings and incense? Why am I to hear the sound of prayer, and be smitten with the voice of the holy? Look round the chamber. Is it not full of us and our punishers? Are we not pursued for ever by the avenging angels? Do they not hold scourges of fire in their hands, and fill every wound they make with thrice distilled poison of the tree Asgard, that grows by the lake of fire? I was an Egyptian; five hundred years ago I lived at the Court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. I longed for power, and I obtained it; I longed to possess the fairest daughters of the land, and I possessed them. I longed for riches, and I practised all evil to gain them. I was at length accused before the King of sorcery. I longed for revenge on my accuser, and I enjoyed my revenge. I stabbed him as he was sleeping in his chamber. The murder was known; I was forced to fly. But I first sent a present of perfumed cakes of Damascus to the mistress of the man who made the discovery; they feasted on them together, and together they died. The ship in which I fled was overtaken by a storm. I was charged with having brought the anger of heaven on the vessel. I was seized, and about to be slain; I drove my dagger through the cap. tain, sprang overboard, and reached the shore. From it, in triumphant revenge, I saw the ship and all the crew perish in the waters. I was now in the Great Desert of Africa; and was starving and scorched, until I lay down to die. But at the last moment an old man came from among the tombs, and offered me bread and water. I followed him to

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"I returned to Egypt. I had been supposed to have sunk to the bottom of the waters with the wreck of the vessel. My countenance was no longer the same. No man remembered me. I began my career. I was full of wild ambition, eager desire, and matchless sagacity. I rapidly outstripped all rivalry. I rose to the first rank under the Ptolemies. I enjoyed the delight of ruining every man who had formerly thwarted me. All Egypt rang with my fame. I had secret enemies, and strange rumours of the means of my perpetual success began to be spread. But I had spies everywhere; a whisper was repaid by death. A frown was avenged like an open accusation. My name became a universal terror. But I had my followers and flatterers only the more. I trampled on mankind. I revelled in seeing the proud grovelling at my feet. I corrupted the lowly, I terrified the high, I bound the strong to my basest services. I was hated and cursed, but I was feared. Daggers, poison, secret rage, and public abhorrence, all were levelled against me; I encountered them all, defied them all, challenged and triumphed over them all. I was the most successful, the most envied, and the most wretched of human beings. But my passions at length changed their colour; I had lost all sense of enjoyment, habit had worn its sense away; the feast, rank, splendour, the adulation of the great, the beauty of woman, all had grown tasteless and wearisome. Life was withering. But I had a fierce enjoyment still, and one that grew keener with the advance of years. I rejoiced in the degradation of my fellow men. I revelled in corrupting the mercenary, in hardening the ferocious, in inflaming the vindictive, in stimulating the violent. I lived, too, in an evil time of the monarchy. Desperate excesses in the court were all but

rivalled by furious vice in the people. The old age of the Greek dynasty was a sinking of the soul and body of dominion together. The deepest sensuality, the wildest waste of public wealth, the meanest extortion, the most reckless tyranny, all that could fester the memory of a nation, were the daily crimes of the decaying court of the Ptolemies. I had come at the right time. Invested with power which made the monarch a cipher, I exulted in the coming ruin-I blinded the eyes of this voluptuous tyranny to its inevitable fate-I had but little to do in urging it to new crime, but I did that little. I wove round it a web of temptation that the strength even of virtue could have scarcely broken, but into which the eager dissoluteness of the Egyptian court plunged as if it had been the most signal gift of fortune. I exulted in the prospect of my accomplished task of precipitating a guilty palace and people into utter ruin; but in the fever of my exultation I had forgot that my time was measured. At a banquet in the King's chamber I saw a guest whose face struck me as having been known to me at some remote period. He was the chieftain of one of the Bactrian tribes, who now came to offer compensation for some outrages of his wild horsemen on a caravan returning from the Indus to Egypt. He was a man of marvelous age, the signs of which he bore in his visage, but of the most singular sagacity. His reputation had gone forth among the people; and all the dealers in forbidden arts, the magi, the soothsayers, and the consulters of the dead, acknowledged their skill outdone by this exhausted and decrepit barbarian. The first glance of his keen eye awoke me to strange and fearful remembrances, but his first word put an end to all doubt, and made me feel the agonies of despair. At the sound of his voice I recognised the old man of the tombs, and felt that the terrible time for his payment was come. It was true, I was to die-I was to suffer for the long banquet of life-I was to undergo the torture of the place of all torture -I was to suffer a hideous retribution for the days of my triumph. They had been many, but they now seemed to me but a moment. Days, months, years, were compressed into

a thought, and I groaned within my inmost soul at the frenzy which had bound me to a master so soon to demand the penalty to the uttermost.

"I flew from the royal chamber; my mind was a whirl of terror, shame, loathing, hatred, and remorse. I seized my sword, and was about to plunge it into my heart, and end a suspense more stinging than despair, when I found my hand arrested, and, on turning, saw the visage of the Bactrian. I indignantly attempted to wrest the sword from him, and drive it home to a heart burning with the poison of the soul. But he held it with a grasp to which my utmost strength was as a child's; I might as well have forced a rock from its base. He smiled, and said, "I am Sammael; you should have known, that to resist me was as absurd as to expect pity from our race. I am one of the princes of evil-I reign over the south-east-I fill the Bactrian deserts with rapine, the Persian chambers with profligacy, and am now come to fling the firebrands of civil war into this court of effeminate Asiatics, savage Africans, and treacherous Greeks. The work was nearly done without me; but Sammael must not let the wickedness of man triumph alone. He tempts, ensnares, betrays, and he must have his reward like mankind. This kingdom will soon be a deluge of blood where it is not a deluge of conflagration, and a deluge of conflagration where it is not a deluge of blood." As he spoke his countenance grew fiery, his voice became awful, and I fell at his feet without the power to struggle or to speak. He was on the point of plunging me through the crust of the earth ten thousand times ten thousand fathoms deep, below the roots of the ocean, to abide in the region of rack and flame. He had already lifted his heel to trample me down. But he paused, and uttered a groan. Isaw a burst of light that covered him from the head to the foot, and in which he writhed as if it had been a robe of venom. I looked up and saw a giant shape, one of the sons of Paradise who watch over the children of Israel, standing before the evil King. They fought for me with lances bright and swift as flashes of lightning. But Sammael was over

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thrown. He sprang from the ground, and cursing, spread his wings and flew up into a passing thunder-cloud.

The son of Paradise still stood over me with a countenance of wrath, and said, "Child of guilt, why shall not vengeance be wrought upon the guilty? Why shall not the subject of the evil one be stricken with his punishment, and be chained on the burning rocks of his dungeon, that are deep as the centre of the earth, and wide as its surface spread out ten thousand times?" I clasped his knees, and bathed them with tears; I groaned, and beat my bosom in the terrors of instant death. The bright vision still held the blow suspended, and saying "that I had been preserved from ruin only by being the descendant of an Israelitish mother, but that my life had earned punishment which must be undergone;" as he spoke the words, he laid his hand upon my forehead with a weight which seemed to crush my brain.

"I shrank and sprang away in fear. I rushed wildly through the palace, through the streets, through the highways. I felt myself moving with a vigour of limb, and savage swiftness, that astonished me. On the way lovertook a troop of Alexandrian merchants going towards the desert of the Pentapolis. I felt a strange instinct to rush among them-I was hungry and parched with thirst. I sprang among a group who had sat down beside one of the wells that border the sands. They all rose up at my sight with a hideous outcry. Some fled, some threw themselves down behind the shelter of the thickets, but some seized their swords and lances, and stood to defend themselves. I glowed with unaccountable rage! The sight of their defiance doubly inflamed me, the very gleam of their steel seemed to me the last insult, and I rushed forward to make them repent of their temerity. At the same instant I felt a sudden thrill of pain; a spear, thrown by a powerful hand, was quivering in my side. I bounded resistlessly on my assailant, and in another moment saw him lying in horrid mutilation at my feet. The rest instantly lost all courage at the sight, and, flinging down their weapons, scattered in all directions, crying for help. But those dastards were not worth pur

[April, suit. The well was before me, I was burning with thirst and fatigue, and I stooped down to drink of its pure and smooth water. What was my astonishment when I saw a lion stooping in the mirror of the well! I distinctly saw the shaggy mane the huge bloodshot eyes, the rough and rapidly moving lips, the pointed tusks, and all red with recent gore I shrank in strange perturbation. I returned to the well again, stooped to drink, and again saw the same furious monster stoop to its calm, blue mirror. A horrid thought crossed my mind. I had known the old doctrine of the Egyptians and Asiatics, which denounced punishment in the shape of brutes to the guilty dead. Had I shared this hideous punishment? I again gave a glance at the water. The sight was now convic tion. I no longer wondered at the wild outcry of the caravan, at the hurried defence, at the strange flight, at the ferocious joy with which I tore down my enemy, and trampled and rent him till he had lost all semblance of man. The punishment had come upon me. My fated spirit had left its human body, and had entered into the shape of the savage inhabitant of the wilderness. The thought was one of indescribable horror. I bounded away with furious speed, I tore up the sands, I darted my fangs into my own flesh, and sought for some respite from hideous thought in the violence of bodily pain. I flew along the limitless plains of the desert, from night till morning, and from morning till night, in hope to exhaust bitter memory by fatigue; all was in vain. I lay down to die, but the vast strength of my frame was proof against fatigue.

"Irushed from hill to valley with the speed of the whirlwind, and still I was but the terror of the wilderness, all whose tenants flew before me. I sought the verge of the little villages, where the natives hide their heads from the scorching sun and the deadly dews. I sought them, to perish by their arrows and lances. I was often wounded; I often carried away with me their barbed iron in my flesh. I often writhed in the agony of poisoned wounds. Still I lived. My life was the solitary existence of the wild beast. I hunted down the antelope, the boar, and the

goat, and gorged upon their blood. I then slept, until hunger, or the cry of the hunter, roused me once more, to commence the same career of flight, pursuit, watching, and wounds. This life was hideous. With the savage instincts of the wild beast, I retained the bitter recollections of my earlier nature, and every hour was felt with the keenness of a punishment allotted by a Judge too powerful to be questioned, and too stern to be propitiated. How long I endured this state of evil, I had no means of knowing. I had lost the human faculty of measuring the flight of time. I howled in rage at the light of the moon as I roamed through the wilderness; I shrank from the broad blaze of the sun, which at once parched my blood and warned my prey of my approach; I felt the tempests of the furious season which drove all the feebler animals from the face of the land to hide in caves and woods. I felt the renewed fires of the season when the sun broke through his clouds once more, and the earth, refreshed with the rains, began to be withered like the weed in the furnace. But, for all other purposes, the moon and the sun rose alike to my mind, embodied as it was in the brute, and sharing the narrowness and obscurity of the animal intellect. Months and years passed unnoted. In the remnant of understanding that was left to me in vengeance, I laboured in vain to recount the periods of my savage suffering; but the periods of my human guilt were, by some strange visitation of wrath, always and instantly ready at my call. I there saw my whole career with a distinctness which seemed beyond all human memory. I lived over every hour, every thought, every passion, every pang. Then the instincts of my degraded state would seize me again;

was again the devourer, the insatiate drinker of blood, the ter ror of the African, the ravager of the sheepfold, the monarch of the forest. But my life of horror seemed at length to approach its limit; I felt the gradual approach of decay. My eyes, once keen as the lightning, could no longer discern the prey on the edge of the horizon; my massive strength grew weary; my limbs, the perfection of muscular strength and

activity, became ponderous, and bore me no longer with the lightness that had given the swiftest gazelle to my grasp. I shrank within my cavern, and was to be roused only by the hunger which I bore long after it had begun to gnaw me. One day 1 dragged out my tardy limbs, urged by famine, to seize upon the buffaloes of a tribe passing across the desert. I sprang upon the leader of the herd, and had already dragged it to the earth, when the chieftain of the tribe rushed forward with his lance, and uttering a loud outcry, I turned from the fallen buffalo to attack the hunter. But in that glance I saw an aspect which I remembered after the lapse of so many years of misery. The countenance of the being who had crushed me out of human nature was before me. I felt the powerful pressure; a pang new to me, a sting of human feeling, pierced through my frame. I dared not rush upon this strange avenger-I cowered in the dust-I would have licked his feet. My fury, my appetite for carnage, my ruthless delight in rending and devouring the helpless creatures of the wilderness, had passed away. I doubly loathed my degradation, and if I could have uttered a human voice, I should at this moment have implored the being before me to plunge his spear into my brain, and extinguish all consciousness at once. As the thought arose, I looked on him once more; he was no longer the African; he wore the grandeur and fearful majesty of Azrael-I knew the Angel of Judgment. Again he laid his grasp upon my front. Again I felt it like the weight of a thunderbolt. I bounded in agony from the plain, fell at his feet, and the sky, the earth, and the avenger, disappeared from my eyes.

"When life returned to me again, I found that I was rushing forward with vast speed, but it was no longer the bound and spring of my sinewy limbs; I felt, too, that I was no longer treading the sands that had so long burned under my feet. I was tossed by winds; I was drenched with heavy moisture; I saw at intervals a strong glare of light bursting on me, and then suddenly obscured. My senses gradually cleared, and I became conscious that my being had undergone a new change. I glanced at my