his tone firm.—“Every night since our late distresses, I have wandered out in search of some relief, and supplicated every passing stranger;—latterly, I have met every night the enemy of man, who”—— “Oh cease, my love, to indulge these horrible thoughts,—they are the results of your disturbed unhappy state of mind.”—“Ines, listen to me. I see that figure as plainly as I see yours,—I hear his voice as distinctly as you hear mine this moment. Want and misery are not naturally fertile in the production of imagination,—they grasp at realities too closely. No man, who wants a meal, conceives that a banquet is spread before him, and that the tempter invites him to sit down and eat at his ease. No,—no, Ines, the evil one, or some devoted agent of his in human form, besets me every night,—and how I shall longer resist the snare, I know not.”—“And in what form does he appear?” said Ines, hoping to turn the channel of his gloomy thoughts, while she appeared to follow their direction. “In that of a middle-aged man, of a serious and staid demeanour, and with nothing remarkable in his aspect except the light of two burning eyes, whose lustre is almost intolerable. He fixes them on me sometimes, and I feel as if there was fascination in their glare. Every night he besets me, and few like me could have resisted his seductions. He has offered, and proved to me, that it is in his power to bestow all that human cupidity could thirst for, on the condition that——I cannot utter! It is one so full of horror and impiety, that, even to listen to it, is scarce less a crime than to comply with it!”

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“Ines, still incredulous, yet imagining that to soothe his delirium was perhaps the best way to overcome it, demanded what that condition was. Though they were alone, Walberg would communicate it only in a whisper; and Ines, fortified as she was by reason hitherto undisturbed, and a cool and steady temper, could not but recollect some vague reports she had heard in her early youth, before she quitted Spain, of a being permitted to wander through it, with power to tempt men under the pressure of extreme calamity with similar offers, which had been invariably rejected, even in the last extremities of despair and dissolution. She was not superstitious,—but, her memory now taking part with her husband’s representation of what had befallen him, she shuddered at the possibility of his being exposed to similar temptation; and she endeavoured to fortify his mind and conscience, by arguments equally appropriate whether he was the victim of a disturbed imagination, or the real object of 

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