assistance in this romance.

_A._ No, when I do I have always a holy and compassionate friar, who
pulls a wonderful restorative or healing balm, out of his bosom. The
puffs of Solomon's Balm of Gilead are a fool to the real merits of my
pharmacopoeia contained in a small vial.

_B._ And pray what may be the title of this book of yours, for I have
known it take more time to fix upon a title than to write the three
volumes.

_A._ I call it _The Undiscovered Secret_, and very properly so too, for
it never is explained. But if you please, I will read you some passages
from it. I think you will approve of them. For instance, now let us take
this, in the second volume. You must know, that Angelicanarinella (for
that is the name of my heroine) is thrown into a dungeon not more than
four feet square, but more than six hundred feet below the surface of
the earth. The ways are so intricate, and the subterranean so vast, and
the dungeons so numerous that the base Ethiop, who has obeyed his
master's orders in confining her, has himself been lost in the
labyrinth, and has not been able to discover what dungeon he put her in.
For three days he has been looking for it, during which our heroine has
been without food, and he is still searching and scratching his woolly
head in despair, as he is to die by slow torture, if he does not
reproduce her--for you observe, the chief who has thrown her into this
dungeon is most desperately in love with her.

_B._ That of course; and that is the way to prove romantic love--you
ill-treat--but still she is certainly in a dilemma, as well as the
Ethiop.

_A._ Granted; but she talks like the heroine of a romance. Listen.
(_Ansard reads._) "The beauteous and divinely-moulded form of the
angelic Angelicanarinella pressed the dank and rotten straw, which had
been thrown down by the scowling, thick-lipped Ethiop for her
repose--she, for whom attendant maidens had smoothed the Sybaritic sheet
of finest texture, under the elaborately carved and sumptuously gilt
canopy, the silken curtains, and the tassels of the purest dust of
gold."

_B._ Tassels of dust of gold! only figuratively, I suppose.

_A._ Nothing more. "Each particular straw of this dank, damp bed was
elastic with delight, at bearing such angelic pressure; and, as our
heroine cast her ineffably beaming eyes about the dark void, lighting up
with their effulgent rays each little portion of the dungeon, as she
glanced them from one part to