the ore that the mine in the mountain flings forth, as the sea
casts its waifs on the sands."

"Give me your hand, fellow laborer!" said Margrave, joyfully. "Ah,
there is no faltering terror in this pulse! I was not mistaken in
the man. What rests, but the place and the hour?--I shall live, I
shall live!"


III


Margrave now entered the litter, and the Veiled Woman drew the
black curtains round him. I walked on, as the guide, some yards in
advance. The air was still, heavy, and parched with the breath of
the Australasian sirocco.

We passed through the meadow lands, studded with slumbering flocks;
we followed the branch of the creek, which was linked to its source
in the mountains by many a trickling waterfall; we threaded the
gloom of stunted, misshapen trees, gnarled with the stringy bark
which makes one of the signs of the strata that nourish gold; and
at length the moon, now in all her pomp of light, mid-heaven among
her subject stars, gleamed through the fissures of the cave, on
whose floor lay the relics of antediluvian races, and rested in one
flood of silvery splendor upon the hollows of the extinct volcano,
with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler sward,
covering the gold below--gold, the dumb symbol of organized
Matter's great mystery, storing in itself, according as Mind, the
informer of Matter, can distinguish its uses, evil and good, bane