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98 phantom of his delirium, Erceldoune remained certain that no unreality, no mere vision fever begotten, would have been impressed as this was upon him; he remembered what it would have been wholly unlike him to have imagined. And this fugitive memory of one who had been his saviour in his extremity, yet who was lost to him on his awakening to consciousness, filled his thoughts unceasingly during the loll of his life in the solitudes of Monastica.

For many weeks he lay there in the antique quiet chamber, with the glimpse of hill and torrent seen through its single casement, and the cadence of the Angelus or the Pro Peccatis alone breaking the stillness at matins, mass, or vespers; the inaction, the imprisonment, the monotony, were as intolerable to him as to a fettered lion, for though solitude might be oftentimes his preference, it was ever the solitude of freedom, of action, and of the grandeur of desert wilds, he recovered slowly but surely, the science of the sisters and his own natural strength bringing him through in the teeth of imminent peril; but it was far into the autumn, and the pines were the only trees not bare in the Moldavian woods, when he rose with anything of his old power in his limbs, with anything of the old muscular