sible I should recognise him?

"When you are travelling in the desert, where there is no beaten track,
are you not guided by the course of streams, by the character of the
trees, by the conformation of their trunks, by the growth of the moss
which clothes them, and by the stars of heaven? and when at another
season, or even twenty years afterwards, should the rains have swelled
the streams, or the sun have dried them up, should the once naked trees
be clothed with leaves, should their trunks have expanded, and moss
covered their roots, even should the north star have changed its
position in the heavens, and you again beheld it, would you not
recognise both star and stream?"

"Doubtless," replied Diaz, "the man who has experience in the desert, is
seldom deceived."

"When you meet a stranger in the forest, who answers you with the cry of
a bird or the voice of an animal, which is to serve as a rallying signal
to you or your friends, do you not immediately say, `This man is one of
us'?"

"Assuredly."

"Well, then; I recognise the child in the grown man, just as you
recognise the small shrub in the tall tree; or the stream that once
murmured softly in the roaring and swollen torrent of to-day. I know
this child again by a mode of speech, which twenty years have scarcely
altered."

"Is not this meeting a somewhat strange coincidence?" interrupted Diaz,
now almost convinced of the Canadian's veracity.

"God," cried Bois-Rose, solemnly, "who commands the breeze to waft
across the desert the fertilising seeds of the male palm to the female
date-tree--God, who confides to the wind which destroys, to the
devastating torrent, or to the bird of passage, the grain which is to be
deposited a thousand miles from the plant that produced it--is he not
also able to send upon the same path two human beings made in his
image?"

Diaz was silent a moment; then having nothing more to advance in
contradiction to the Canadian's truthful words whose honest manner of
speech carried with it an irresistible conviction, he turned towards
Pepe:

"Did you," said he, "also recognise in Arellanos' adopted child, the
Countess de Mediana's son!"

"It would be impossible for any one who ever saw his mother long to
mistake him. Enough! let the Duke de Armada contradict me."

Don Antonio, too proud to utter a falsehood, could not deny the truth
without degrading himself in the eyes of his accusers, unless he
destroyed the only means of def