answering her on this point, but said, “Immalee, I come from a world wholly unlike that you inhabit, amid inanimate flowers, and unthinking birds. I come from a world where all, as I do, think and speak.” Immalee was speechless with wonder and delight for some time; at length she exclaimed, “Oh, how they must love each other! even I love my poor birds and flowers, and the trees that shade, and the waters that sing to me!” The stranger smiled. “In all that world, perhaps there is not another being beautiful and innocent as you. It is a world of suffering, guilt, and care.” It was with much difficulty she was made to comprehend the meaning of these words, but when she did, she exclaimed, “Oh, that I could live in that world, for I would make every one happy!”—“But you could not, Immalee,” said the stranger; “this world is of such extent that it would take your whole life to traverse it, and, during your progress, you never could be conversant with more than a small number of sufferers at a time, and the evils they undergo are in many instances such as you or no human power could relieve.” At these words, Immalee burst into an agony of tears. “Weak, but lovely being,” said the stranger, “could your tears heal the corrosions of disease?—cool the burning throb of a cancered heart?—wash the pale slime from the clinging lips of famine?—or, more than all, quench the fire of forbidden passion?” Immalee paused aghast at this enumeration, and could only faulter out, that wherever she went, she would bring her flowers and sunshine among the healthy, and they should all sit under the shade of her own tamarind. That for disease and death, she had long been accustomed to see flowers wither and die their beautiful death of nature. “And perhaps,” she added, after a reflective pause, “as I have often known them to retain their delicious odour even after they were faded, perhaps what thinks may live too after the form has faded, and that is a thought of joy.” Of passion, she said she knew nothing, and could propose no remedy for an evil she was unconscious of. She had seen flowers fade with the season, but could not imagine why the flower should destroy itself. “But did you never trace a worm in the flower?” said the stranger, with the sophistry of corruption. “Yes,” answered Immalee, “but the worm was not the native of the flower; its own leaves never could have hurt it.” This led to a discussion, which Immalee’s impregnable innocence, though combined with ardent curiosity and quick apprehension, rendered perfectly harmless to her. Her playful and desultory answers,—her restless eccentricity of imagination,—her keen and piercing, though ill-poised intellectual weapons,—and, above all, her instinctive and unfailing tact in matters of right and wrong, formed altogether 

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