s and perpetuate his name. But the knight
is himself a wreck, with all his best energies burnt out in those weird
orgies beneath the water; and his bridal vow is a hollow one, for when
he utters it he hears the shriek of the Lurline blending with the
wedding music, and his nightly couch is to be henceforth a torture of
unrest--his ride by day a mere hopeless fleeing from the ghosts of dead
pleasures.

Something of the same character is that other wild legend which has
grown into song and drama--sprung from the Norse branch of the great
German mind,--that of the "Ice Witch" or the "Frozen Hand." Here the
Viking Harold is less wrecked by temptation than by circumstance; but
the result of the enthralment is the same. The ice of the Pole closes
around him with the same fatality as the waters of the Rhine around his
brother and prototype. Surrounded by the white arms of Hecla in her
palace of ice, he ceases to lament the bride who is awaiting him in the
far South; and he has not even a thought of regret to cast towards his
perished companions and the stout ship that once bore him so proudly,
her brown ribs now bleaching whitely on the Arctic shore. He too
returns, after a long period, but he brings with him the fatal gift of
his Northern bride--_a hand of ice_. He may be strong and brave still,
as he was when he went away; but he is no longer the peerless and envied
warrior. Men look upon him with a ghostly shudder, and women shrink back
from his chilling presence. Not even Freja can thaw away all the ice
that has gathered in his veins. He may chastise the robber Ruric from
the hills, and sleep once more in the warm embrace of Isoldane; but who
knows that at some midnight hour the old curse may not return upon him
and the hand he stretches in love and fondness strike death to the
hearts that are dearest? Not the same--changed, changed--as is every man
who has once yielded to the great temptation of his existence.

All this, which may be purely irrelevant matter, has grown out of a
visit paid by some of the characters in this narration, to a fashionable
restaurant and saloon on Broadway, and the belief that in some of those
houses temptation is lurking in so insidious and deadly a form that they
are doing a thousand times the injury inflicted by the acknowledged
haunts of vice. Special allusion may or may not be made to the gorgeous
but tawdry room in which the three sat down to discuss their _a la mode_
beef, coffee and bis