a mighty wind; the distant
summits of the minarets rocked and wavered, and, with a tremendous crash,
the paradise of the Faithful disappeared.

* * * * *

As I rang the bell, and requested the club-waiter to carry away the
smoking fragments of the moderator-lamp which I had accidentally knocked
over in awaking from my nightmare, I reflected on the vanity of men and
the unsubstantial character of the future homes that their fancy has
fashioned. The ideal heavens of modern poets and novelists, and of
ancient priests, come no nearer than the drugged dreams of the angekok
and the biraark of Greenland and Queensland to that rest and peace
whereof it has not entered into the mind of man to conceive. To the
wrong man each of our pictured heavens would be a hell, and even to the
appropriate devotee each would become a tedious purgatory.

A CHEAP NIGGER.

I.

"Have you seen the Clayville Dime?"

Moore chucked me a very shabby little sheet of printed matter. It
fluttered feebly in the warm air, and finally dropped on my recumbent
frame. I was lolling in a hammock in the shade of the verandah.

I did not feel much inclined for study, but I picked up the Clayville
Dime and lazily glanced at that periodical, while Moore relapsed into the
pages of Ixtlilxochitl. He was a literary character for a planter, had
been educated at Oxford (where I made his acquaintance), and had
inherited from his father, with a large collection of Indian and Mexican
curiosities, a taste for the ancient history of the New World.

Sometimes I glanced at the newspaper; sometimes I looked out at the
pleasant Southern garden, where the fountain flashed and fell among
weeping willows, and laurels, orange-trees, and myrtles.

"Hullo!" I cried suddenly, disturbing Moore's Aztec researches, "here is
a queer affair in the usually quiet town of Clayville. Listen to this;"
and I read aloud the following "par," as I believe paragraphs are styled
in newspaper offices:--

"'Instinct and Accident.--As Colonel Randolph was driving through our
town yesterday and was passing Captain Jones's sample-room, where the
colonel lately shot Moses Widlake in the street, the horses took alarm
and started violently downhill. The colonel kept his seat till
rounding the corner by the Clayville Bank, when his wheels came into
collision with that edifice, and our gallant townsman was violently
shot out. He is now lying in a very precariou