his foot upon the corpse of a
youth, sat the crowned and sceptered majesty of Death. The waters of
oblivion encompassed the throne and corpse, which lay with its head and
feet bathed in its waters--for out of the Unknown had life come, and to
the Unknown had it departed. Before me, in vision, swept the mighty
stream of human life from which I had been swept to these strange
shores. All its sufferings, its delusions; its baffled struggles; its
wrongs, came upon me with a sense of spiritual agony in them that
religion--my religion, which was their only consolation--must vanish in
the crucible of Science. And that Science was the magician that was to
purify and exalt the world. To live in the Present; to die in it and
become as the dust; a mere speck, a flash of activity in the far,
limitless expanse of Nature, of Force, of Matter in which a spiritual
ideal had no part. It was horrible to think of. The prejudices of
inherited religious faith, the contracted forces of thought in which I
had been born and reared could not be uprooted or expanded without pain.

CHAPTER X.

I had begun to feel an intense longing to return to my own country, but
it was accompanied by a desire, equally as strong, to carry back to that
woe-burdened land some of the noble lessons and doctrines I had learned
in this. I saw no means of doing it that seemed so available as a
companion,--a being, born and bred in an atmosphere of honor and grandly
humane ideas and actions.

My heart and my judgment turned to Wauna. She was endeared to me by long
and gentle association. She was self-reliant and courageous, and
possessed a strong will. Who, of all my Mizora acquaintances, was so
well adapted to the service I required.

When I broached the subject to her, Wauna expressed herself as really
pleased with the idea; but when we went to the Preceptress, she
acknowledged a strong reluctance to the proposition. She said:

"Wauna can form no conception of the conditions of society in your
country. They are far, very far, behind our own. They will, I fear,
chafe her own nature more than she can improve theirs. Still, if I
thought she could lead your people into a broader intelligence, and
start them on the way upward to enlightenment and real happiness, I
would let her go. The moment, however, that she desires to return she
must be aided to do so."

I pledged myself to abide by any request the Preceptress might make of
me. Wauna's own inclinations g