a few seconds at a time. The morning was still too obscure for me to see the landscape now below, and the driver still directed the balloon upward, lest it should be dashed to pieces upon the tops of the mountains of Mongolia and the Burmese Empire. We had a long journey before us, but our rate of travelling was rapid in the extreme; and if no accident happened we might reasonably expect to arrive at our destination before night.
The faint glow of dawn began to appear in the sky, which was one vast, dark, ethereal expanse without a cloud. Beneath us there seemed to be gathering a white mantle over the earth, like a boundless sheet of snow. My attention was all at once arrested by a strange increase of light. I t was behind me, and as I was contemplating my friend the Doctor, who had saved my life no less than four times, wondering what was to be his future destiny and my own, I saw the rays of this extraordinary light illuminating the back of his head. I turned round in renewed astonishment, mingled with fear and awe, and beheld suspended in the sky, like a beautiful pale-red lamp, and not very far from us, the Star of Victory!
I had been thinking very much within the last two or three days of this glorious vision, which had only appeared to the Doctor and myself in dreams. It seemed to be the harbinger of some unspeakable pleasure, or inestimable happiness, yet in store for us both; and taught us plainly that, no matter how great our fall when we did fall, or how dark and deep the abyss into which we had fallen, there is still, if our agony and despair will permit us to see it, the load-star of hope and consolation shining upon us. The ineffable brightness of the mercy of our Almighty Creator is not withdrawn so long as we have life to animate, or sense to enlighten us. It is only, as far as we in our ignorance can possibly know, when Death interposes his grim visage
