more?--You, my dear husband, now actually behold an Undine before
you."

The knight would have persuaded himself that his lovely wife was
under the influence of one of her odd whims, and that she was only
amusing herself and him with her extravagant inventions. He wished
it might be so. But with whatever emphasis he said this to himself,
he still could not credit the hope for a moment: a strange shivering
shot through his soul; unable to utter a word, he gazed upon the
sweet speaker with a fixed eye. She shook her head in distress,
sighed from her full heart, and then proceeded in the following
manner:-

"We should be far superior to you, who are another race of the human
family,--for we also call ourselves human beings, as we resemble them
in form and features--had we not one evil peculiar to ourselves.
Both we and the beings I have mentioned as inhabiting the other
elements vanish into air at death and go out of existence, spirit and
body, so that no vestige of us remains; and when you hereafter awake
to a purer state of being, we shall remain where sand, and sparks,
and wind, and waves remain. Thus we have no souls; the element moves
us, and, again, is obedient to our will, while we live, though it
scatters us like dust when we die; and as we have nothing to trouble
us, we are as merry as nightingales, little gold-fishes, and other
pretty children of nature.

"But all beings aspire to rise in the scale of existence higher than
they are. It was therefore the wish of my father, who is a powerful
water-prince in the Mediterranean Sea, that his only daughter should
become possessed of a soul, although she should have to endure many