ly to the breeze that thus wafted
it onward. Nearer and nearer toward the vessel it came, though not
pursuing the same direction; and in five minutes it passed within a few
yards of the stern of the kapitan-pasha's ship.

But, oh! wondrous and unaccountable fact. There, stretched upon his back
in that bounding boat, and evidently buried in deep slumber, with the
rays of the rising sun gleaming upon his fine and now slightly flushed
countenance, lay he whose image was so indelibly impressed upon the
heart of Nisida--her handsome and strangely-fated Fernand Wagner! The
moment the conviction that the sleeper was indeed he struck to the mind
of Nisida, she would have called him by name--she would have endeavored
to awake him, if only to exchange a single word of fondness, for her
assumed dumbness was for the moment forgotten; but she was rendered
motionless and remained speechless--stupefied, paralyzed, as it were,
with mingled wonder and joy; wonder that he should have found the means
of escape from the island, and joy that she was thus permitted to behold
him at least once again. But the pleasure which this incident excited in
her mind was transitory indeed; for the boat swept by, as if urged on by
a stronger impulse than that of the gentle breeze of morning--and in
another minute Nisida beheld it no more.

The sun was setting behind the western hills of Sicily as Fernand Wagner
entered the squalid suburb which at that period stretched from the town
of Syracuse to the sea. His step was elastic, and he held his head
high--for his heart was full of joyous and burning hope. Hitherto the
promises of the angel who had last appeared to him were completely
fulfilled. The boat was wafted by a favorable breeze direct from the
Island of Snakes to the shores of Sicily; and he had landed in the
immediate vicinity of Syracuse--the town in which a further revelation
was to be made in respect to the breaking of the spell which had fixed
upon him the frightful doom of the Wehr-Wolf! But little suspected
Fernand Wagner that one morning, while he slept, his boat had borne him
through the proud fleet of the Ottomans--little wist he that his beloved
Nisida had caught sight of him as he was wafted rapidly past the stern
of the kapitan-pasha's ship! For on that occasion he had slept during
hours; and when he had awakened, not a bark nor sail save his own was
visible on the mighty expanse of water.

And now it was with elastic step and joyous