me to his ears, but the thunderings which he heard were only
the voice of conscience. Again his own footsteps and his voice sounded
in his fancy as the footsteps and voices of fiends, with which his
imagination peopled the room. His state and his existence seemed to
him a confused and troubled dream; he tore his hair--threw it on the
table--and immediately started back with a hollow groan; for his locks,
which but a few hours before had been as black as a raven's wing, were
now white as snow!

On discovering this, he gave a low but frantic laugh. "Ha, ha, ha!" he
exclaimed; "here is another mark--here is food for despair. Silently,
but surely, did the hand of God work this, as proof that I am hopeless!
But I will bear it; I will bear the sight! I now feel myself a man
blasted by the eye of God Himself! Ha, ha, ha! Food for despair! Food
for despair!"

Immediately he passed into his own room, and approaching the
looking-glass beheld a sight calculated to move a statue. His hair
had become literally white, but the shades of his dark complexion, now
distorted by terror and madness, flitted, as his features worked
under the influence of his tremendous passions, into an expression so
frightful, that deep fear came over himself. He snatched one of his
razors, and fled from the glass to the kitchen. He looked upon the fire,
and saw the white ashes lying around its edge.

"Ha!" said he, "the light is come! I see the sign. I am directed, and I
will follow it. There is yet one hope. The immolation! I shall be saved,
yet so as by fire. It is for this my hair has become white;--the sublime
warning for my self-sacrifice! The color of ashes!--white--white! It is
so! I will sacrifice my body in material fire, to save my soul from that
which is eternal! But I had anticipated the sign. The self-sacrifice is
accepted!"*

* As the reader may be disposed to consider the nature
of the priest's death an unjustifiable stretch of
fiction, I have only to say in reply, that it is no
fiction at all. It is not, I believe, more than forty,
or perhaps fifty, years since a priest committed his
body to the flames, for the purpose of saving his soul
by an incrematory sacrifice. The object of the suicide
being founded on the superstitious belief, that a
priest guilty of great crimes possesses the privilege
of securing salvation by self-sacrifice. We have heard
two or three legends among the pe