shelter amid the ruins of the pagoda. They approached it in silence; and, amid the convulsions and fury of nature, it was singular to see two beings walk on together without exchanging a word of apprehension, or feeling a thought of danger,—the one armed by despair, the other by innocence. Immalee would rather have sought the shelter of her favourite banyan-tree, but the stranger tried to make her comprehend, that her danger would be much greater there than in the spot he pointed out to her. “Danger!” said the Indian, while a bright and wild smile irradiated her features; “can there be danger when you are near me?”—“Is there, then, no danger in my presence?—few have met me without dreading, and without feeling it too!” and his countenance, as he spoke, grew darker than the heaven at which he scowled. “Immalee,” he added, in a voice still deeper and more thrilling, from the unwonted operation of human emotion in its tones; “Immalee, you cannot be weak enough to believe that I have power of controuling the elements? If I had,” he continued, “by the heaven that is frowning at me, the first exertion of my power should be to collect the most swift and deadly of the lightnings that are hissing around us, and transfix you where you stand!”—“Me?” repeated the trembling Indian, her cheek growing paler at his words, and the voice in which they were uttered, than at the redoubling fury of the storm, amid whose pauses she scarce heard them.—“Yes—you—you—lovely as you are, and innocent, and pure, before a fire more deadly consumes your existence, and drinks your heart-blood—before you are longer exposed to a danger a thousand times more fatal than those with which the elements menace you—the danger of my accursed and miserable presence!”

“Immalee, unconscious of his meaning, but trembling with impassioned grief at the agitation with which he spoke, approached him to soothe the emotion of which she knew neither the name or the cause. Through the fractures of the ruin the red and ragged lightnings disclosed, from time to time, a glimpse of her figure,—her dishevelled hair,—her pallid and appealing look,—her locked hands, and the imploring bend of her slight form, as if she was asking pardon for a crime of which she was unconscious,—and soliciting an interest in griefs not her own. All around her wild, unearthly, and terrible,—the floor strewed with fragments of stone, and mounds of sand,—the vast masses of ruined architecture, whose formation seemed the work of no human hand, and whose destruction appeared the sport of demons,—the yawning fissures of the arched and ponderous roof, through which heaven darkened and blazed alternately with a gloom that wrapt every thing, or a light more fearful than that gloom.—All 

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