to a being whose existence was composed of felicitous tacts and unreflecting instincts—and then exclaimed, “We both must have grown in the world of voices, for I know what you say better than the chirp of the loxia, or the cry of the peacock. That must be a delightful world where they all speak—what would I give that my roses grew in the world of answers!”

“At this moment the stranger made certain signals of hunger, which Immalee understood in a moment, and told him to follow her to where the tamarind and the fig were shedding their fruit—where the stream was so clear, you could count the purple shells in its bed—and where she would scoop for him in the cocoa-shell the cool waters that flowed beneath the shade of the mango. As they went, she gave him all the information about herself that she could. She told him that she was the daughter of a palm-tree, under whose shade she had been first conscious of existence, but that her poor father had been long withered and dead—that she was very old, having seen many roses decay on their stalks; and though they were succeeded by others, she did not love them so well as the first, which were a great deal larger and brighter—that, in fact, every thing had grown smaller latterly, for she was now able to reach to the fruit which formerly she was compelled to wait for till it dropt on the ground;—but that the water was grown taller, for once she was forced to drink it on her hands and knees, and now she could scoop it in a cocoa-shell. Finally, she added, she was much older than the moon, for she had seen it waste away till it was dimmer than the light of a fire-fly; and the moon that was lighting them now would decline too, and its successor be so small, that she would never again give it the name she had given to the first—Sun of the Night. “But,” said her companion, “how are you able to speak a language you never learned from your loxias and peacocks?”—“I will tell you,” said Immalee, with an air of solemnity, which her beauty and innocence made at once ludicrous and imposing, and in which she betrayed a slight tendency to that wish to mystify that distinguishes her delightful sex,—“there came a spirit to me from the world of voices, and it whispered to me sounds that I never have forgotten, long, long before I was born.”—“Really?” said the stranger. “Oh yes!—long before I could gather a fig, or gather the water in my hand, and that must be before I was born. When I was born, I was not so high as the rose-bud, at which I tried to catch, now I am as near the moon as the palm-tree—sometimes I catch her beams sooner than he does, therefore I must be very old, and very high.” At these words, the stranger, with an expression indescribable, leaned against a 

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