k with me!
Drink! First to revenge! I haven't had it yet, as I'd thought; that
has all to be gone over again. But it's sure now--surer than ever.
After, we shall drink to success in love. Mine is not hopeless, yet.
Lost! she is found again--found! Ah, my darling Adela!" he exclaims,
staggering towards the portrait, and in tipsy glee contemplating it,
"you thought to escape me; but no. No one can get away from Gil Uraga--
friend, sweetheart, or enemy. You shall yet be enfolded in these arms;
if not as my wife, my--_margarita_!"

CHAPTER FORTY ONE.

AN EARTHLY PARADISE.

"Oh that the desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair spirit for my monitor!
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her.
Ye elements, in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted, can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot--
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot."

Oft during his sojourn in the sequestered valley do these lines occur to
the young prairie merchant. And vividly; for, in very truth, he has
realised the aspiration of the poet.

But, though dwelling in a desert, far different is the scene habitually
before his eyes. From the front of the humble chalet that has so
opportunely afforded him a shelter, seated under the spreading branches
of a pecan-tree, he can look on a landscape lovely as ever opened to the
eyes of man--almost as that closed against our first parents when
expelled from Paradise. Above he beholds a sapphire sky, scarce ever
shadowed by a cloud; a sun whose fierce, fervid beams become softened as
they fall amid the foliage of evergreen oaks; among clustering groves
that show all the varied tints of verdure, disporting upon green glassy
glades, and glinting into arbours overshadowed by the sassafras laurel,
the Osage orange, and the wild China-tree, laced together by a trellis
of grape vines. A lake in the centre of this luxurious vegetation,
placid as sleep itself, only stirred by the webbed feet of waterfowl, or
the wings of dipping swallows, with above and below a brawling rivulet,
here and there showing cascades like the tails of white horses, or the
skirts of ballroom belles floating through waltz or gallopade.

In correspondence with these fair sights are the sounds heard. By day
the cooing of doves, the soft tones of the golden oriole, and the lively
chatter of the red cardinal; by night the