nt had
been thus arranged to exclude the cold.

"He hath perished the past night, mistaking the bone-house for the
Refuge!" exclaimed the clavier: "Maria and her Son intercede for his
soul!"

"Is the unfortunate man truly dead?" asked the Genoese with more of
worldly care, and with greater practice in the investigation of facts.
"The frozen sleep long before the currents of life cease entirely to run."

The Augustine commanded his followers to remove the cloak, though with
little hope that the suggestion of the other would prove true. When the
cloth was raised, the collapsed and pallid features of one in whom life
was unequivocally extinct were exposed to view. Unlike most of those that
perish of cold, who usually sink into the long sleep of eternity by a
gradual numbness and a slowly increasing unconsciousness, there was an
expression of pain in the countenance of the stranger which seemed to
announce that his parting struggles had been severe, and that he had
resigned his hold of that mysterious principle which connects the soul to
the body, with anguish. A shriek from Christine interrupted the awful gaze
of the travellers, and drew their looks in another direction. She was
clinging to the neck of Adelheid, her arms appearing to writhe with the
effort to incorporate heir two bodies into one.

"It is he! It is he!" muttered the frightened and half frantic girl,
burying her pale face in the bosom of her friend. "Oh! God!--it is he!"

"Of whom art thou speaking, dear?" demanded the wondering, but not the
less awe-struck, Adelheid, believing that the weakened nerves of the poor
girl were unstrung by the horror of the spectacle--"it is a traveller like
ourselves, that has unhappily perished in the very storm from which, by
the kindness of Providence, we have been permitted to escape. Thou
shouldst not tremble thus; for, fearful as it is, he is in a condition to
which we all must come."

"So soon! so soon! so suddenly--oh! it is he!" Adelheid, alarmed at the
violence of Christine's feelings, was quite at a loss to account for them,
when the relapsed grasp and the dying voice showed that her friend had
fainted. Sigismund was one of the first to come to the assistance of his
sister, who was soon restored to consciousness by the ordinary
applications. In order to effect the cure she was borne to a rock at some
little distance from the rest of the party, where none of the other sex
presumed to come, with the exception of