heaven. In that deep mirror, she perceives that she has
grown older.

In a few days, a few hours, a few minutes, perhaps in a single second,
she has attained the maturity of age. She, who for more than eighteen
centuries has been as a woman of twenty, carrying through successive
generations the load of her imperishable youth--she has grown old, and
may, perhaps, at length, hope to die. Every minute of her life may now
bring her nearer to the last home! Transported by that ineffable hope,
she rises, and lifts her eyes to heaven, clasping her hands in an
attitude of fervent prayer. Then her eyes rest on the tall statue of
stone, representing St. John. The head, which the martyr carries in his
hand, seems, from beneath its half-closed granite eyelid, to cast upon
the Wandering Jewess a glance of commiseration and pity. And it was she,
Herodias who, in the cruel intoxication of a pagan festival, demanded
the murder of the saint! And it is at the foot of the martyr's image,
that, for the first time, the immortality, which weighed on her for so
many centuries, seems likely to find a term!

"Oh, impenetrable mystery! oh, divine hope!" she cries. "The wrath of
heaven is at length appeased. The hand of the Lord brings me to the
feet of the blessed martyr, and I begin once more to feel myself a
human creature. And yet it was to avenge his death, that the same heaven
condemned me to eternal wanderings!

"Oh, Lord! grant that I may not be the only one forgiven. May
he--the artisan, who like me, daughter of a king, wanders on for
centuries--likewise hope to reach the end of that immense journey!

"Where is he, Lord? where is he? Hast thou deprived me of the power once
bestowed, to see and hear him through the vastness of intervening space?
Oh, in this mighty moment, restore me that divine gift--for the more I
feel these human infirmities, which I hail and bless as the end of
my eternity of ills, the more my sight loses the power to traverse
immensity, and my ear to catch the sound of that wanderer's accent, from
the other extremity of the globe?"

Night had fallen, dark and stormy. The wind rose in the midst of the
great pine-trees. Behind their black summits, through masses of dark
cloud, slowly sailed the silver disk of the moon. The invocation of the
Wandering Jewess had perhaps been heard. Suddenly, her eyes closed--with
hands clasped together, she remained kneeling in the heart of the
ruins--motionless as a statue upon a