sight of the tortured bird, and had turned my head in another direction,
my nephew kept looking over the rails, and that, as he saw the
struggling creature, he cried out to me the words you misconstrued. And
thus the mystery is cleared up."

"Miserable and fatal error," he gasped out, as he staggered back. "And
the connection!--the connection! There _was_ retribution in those
diamond eyes."

"What mean you, sir?"

"The bird's eyes that haunt me in my reveries, and enter into the
sockets of my dream-beings!"

"Are you mad?"

"No; or the heavens are mad, with their swirling orbs and blazing
comets, that rush sighing through space before some terrible power that
will give them no respite, except with the condition that when they rest
they die."

"Poor youth! so early doomed; I pity you."

"Ay, pity those who have no pity--those are the truly wretched; for
pity, in the world's life, is the soul of reason's action. Ah, madam, it
is those who have pity who do not need the pity of others, for they are
generally free from the faults that produce the unhappiness that needs
pity."

"But you have been punished, I admit, in a very strange and mysterious