the times, “How do you, fair maid?” she answered, “God made me,” from the words of the Christian Catechism that had been breathed into her infant lip. “God never made a fairer creature,” replied the stranger, grasping her hand, and fixing on her eyes that still burn in the sockets of that arch-deceiver. “Oh yes!” answered Immalee, “he made many things more beautiful. The rose is redder than I am—the palm-tree is taller than I am—and the wave is bluer than I am;—but they all change, and I never change. I have grown taller and stronger, though the rose fades every six moons; and the rock splits to let in the bats, when the earth shakes; and the waves fight in their anger till they turn grey, and far different from the beautiful colour they have when the moon comes dancing on them, and sending all the young, broken branches of her light to kiss my feet, as I stand on the soft sand. I have tried to gather them every night, but they all broke in my hand the moment I dipt it into water.”—“And have you fared better with the stars?” said the stranger smiling.—“No,” answered the innocent being, “the stars are the flowers of heaven, and the rays of the moon the boughs and branches; but though they are so bright, they only blossom in the night,—and I love better the flowers that I can gather, and twine in my hair. When I have been all night wooing a star, and it has listened and descended, springing downwards like a peacock from its nest, it has hid itself often afterwards playfully amid the mangoes and tamarinds where it fell; and though I have searched for it till the moon looked wan and weary of lighting me, I never could find it. But where do you come from?—you are not scaly and voiceless like those who grow in the waters, and show their strange shapes as I sit on the shore at sun-set;—nor are you red and diminutive like those who come over the waters to me from other worlds, in houses that can live on the deep, and walk so swiftly, with their legs plunged in the water. Where do you come from?—you are not so bright as the stars that live in the blue sea above me, nor so deformed as those that toss in the darker sea at my feet. Where did you grow, and how came you here?—there is not a canoe on the sand; and though the shells bear the fish that live in them so lightly over the waters, they never would bear me. When I placed my foot on their scolloped edge of crimson and purple, they sunk into the sand.”—“Beautiful creature,” said the stranger, “I come from a world where there are thousands like me.”—“That is impossible,” said Immalee, “for I live here alone, and other worlds must be like this.”—“What I tell you is true, however,” said the stranger. Immalee paused for a moment, as if making the first effort of reflection—an exertion painful enough 

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