"Quick, quick, my lord," cried Yoomy, "let us follow them; and from
the golden waters where she lies, our Yillah may emerge."

"No, no," said Babbalanja,--"no Yillah there!--from yonder promised-
land, fewer seekers will return, than go. Under a gilded guise,
happiness is still their instinctive aim. But vain, Yoomy, to snatch
at Happiness. Of that we may not pluck and eat. It is the fruit of our
own toilsome planting; slow it grows, nourished by many teats, and all
our earnest tendings. Yet ere it ripen, frosts may nip;--and then, we
plant again; and yet again. Deep, Yoomy, deep, true treasure lies;
deeper than all Mardi's gold, rooted to Mardi's axis. But unlike gold,
it lurks in every soil,--all Mardi over. With golden pills and
potions is sickness warded off?--the shrunken veins of age, dilated
with new wine of youth? Will gold the heart-ache cure? turn toward us
hearts estranged? will gold, on solid centers empires fix? 'Tis toil
world-wasted to toil in mines. Were all the isles gold globes, set in
a quicksilver sea, all Mardi were then a desert. Gold is the only
poverty; of all glittering ills the direst. And that man might not
impoverish himself thereby, Oro hath hidden it, with all other
banes,--saltpeter and explosives, deep in mountain bowels, and river-
beds. But man still will mine for it; and mining, dig his doom.--
Yoomy, Yoomy!--she we seek, lurks not in the Golden Hills!"

"Lo, a vision!" cried Yoomy, his hands wildly passed across his eyes.
"A vast and silent bay, belted by silent villages:--gaunt dogs howling
over grassy thresholds at stark corpses of old age and infancy; gray
hairs mingling with sweet flaxen curls; fields, with turned furrows,
choked with briers; arbor-floors strown over with hatchet-helves,
rotting in the iron; a thousand paths, marked with foot-prints, all
inland leading, none villageward; and strown with traces, as of a