spread for couches, the bars of the lattices were of the finest brass, and the scarlet and purple tissues of Tyre, were drawn over them to exclude the meridian heats, and cast the artificial lights of the outgoing day. The house, though within the walls of the city, stood surrounded by a garden in which were profusely planted all the balsamic shrubs of the east. A clear rill of water meandered among the trees, and in its course fell into marble baths, or rose in stately fountains.

Keroob was well provided with all the luxurious pleasures of this world, and did not doubt but by his almsgiving, fastings, and prayers, he could establish a good claim to the joys of the next. He had certain exercises at set times, which he required his religion to perform; and it is but justice to him to say, that he was very exact in never suffering his pleasures to encroach upon these, but then he thought it but fair that his religion should be equally forbearing and never presume to interfere with his pleasures; and thus giving, as he thought, both worlds their due, he kept his goods in peace.

Keroob had never opposed Caphtor's union with Sephora, though he knew the comparative meanness of her condition. His great desire was to see him married, but he found that he and his son did not agree in their ideas of a wife. He had proposed a great many to him, whom he thought every thing that could be desired. But riches and beauty, which constituted Keerob's idea of perfection, were precisely the two things that Caphtor thought he could dispense with, and his projects for his son's happiness had so often been defeated, that when he heard he had at last found some one to please him, instead of objecting to his choice, he made a feast and called all his neighbours. together to rejoice.

Very soon after Sephora's marriage, Pythonissa died. Her health, which seemed to experience such a renewal on her happy change from wickedness to virtue, soon again declined, and the revival was found to be of a very temporary nature. Her constitution had received such a shock from her midnight orgies of magic, and the conflicts

her mind underwent at that time, as she never recovered; and in the daily enfeebling powers of a diseased and weary frame, she felt an awful and incessant monitor reminding her of the errors and sins of her past life. She stayed long among the vineyards of Mount Carmel, and had a tent erected within the shepherd's fold, that she might inhale the breath of sheep. But neither this, nor the freshness of the breezes of the ocean, nor any other remedy her friends could devise, afforded her any effectual relief. She lingered on for more than a year, apparently much in the same state, but perfectly aware herself of her inward decay. Towards the last fortnight of her life she got rapidly worse. Her patience, her hope, and her humility, increased with her sufferings, until she calmly breathed her last in her daughter's arms.

Caphtor and Sephora remained on the banks of the Kishon during the days of mourning, and after those were accomplished, she prepared to leave for ever the abode of her fathers. It was to her a most

solemn separation, hardly less so than the one she had lately experienced. She felt it as one of those shocks which nature gives as a warning of her instability. It was not merely local attachments that she regretted, and breaking through those innumerable tender ties those gossamer threads that played so brightly in the sunshine of social and domestic life, and floated over the endeared scenes where infancy, childhood, and youth had been passed-it was not merely bursting through this fairy web of happiness that made her weep. But she felt it as a complete detachment of a portion of life, the tearing off of a branch that bore all the earliest and fairest blossoms of life, and which fell to the earth with the parent shade, that had so fondly nourished and sheltered it.

Keroob was most eager for the days of mourning to be ended, but he found some solace for his impatience in contriving various luxuries and splendours to surprise Sephora, who on her part was happily quite unconscious of the honours that awaited her. She knew before she married Caphtor, that

his father was a man of great wealth, and not only rich in flocks and in herds, but also in silver, and in gold, and in raiment. Yet this circumstance was so far from having had any weight with her in her choice of him for her husband, that it scarcely made any impression on her mind, for she was hardly aware of the ideal importance that was attached to wealth in the eyes of the world, and knew but little of those ostentatious vanities that sojourners in cities had adopted, so different from the simplcity of pastoral life.

Sephora with difficulty got leave to mourn for her mother seventy days, and the thirteenth of the month Adon was fixed on for her removal to Nain. She got up early in the morning to cast a farewell look on the scenes of her youth. They were all dear to her, but she paused with peculiar feelings in those haunts where the spirit of Patrobus still seemed to linger. She was yet bending over his favourite bed of flowers and looking at them through her tears, when Caphtor came to lead her away, and tell her the pro