desert, and had felt the frozen breath of an Arctic region. Long
sojourning amid wild and dangerous men, he still wore beneath his vest
the ataghan which he had once struck into the throat of a Turkish
robber. In every foreign clime he had lost something of his New
England characteristics; and, perhaps, from every people he had
unconsciously borrowed a new peculiarity; so that when the world-
wanderer again trod the street of his native village, it is no wonder
that he passed unrecognized, though exciting the gaze and curiosity of
all. Yet, as his arm casually touched that of a young woman, who was
wending her way to an evening lecture, she started, and almost uttered
a cry.

"Ralph Cranfield!" was the name that she half articulated.

"Can that be my old playmate, Faith Egerton?" thought the traveller,
looking round at her figure, but without pausing.

Ralph Cranfield, from his youth upward, had felt himself marked out
for a high destiny. He had imbibed the idea--we say not whether it
were revealed to him by witchcraft, or in a dream of prophecy, or that
his brooding fancy had palmed its own dictates upon him as the oracles
of a Sibyl--but he had imbibed the idea, and held it firmest among his
articles of faith, that three marvellous events of his life were to be
confirmed to him by three signs.

The first of these three fatalities, and perhaps the one on which his
youthful imagination had dwelt most fondly, was the discovery of the
maid, who alone, of all the maids on earth, could make him happy by
her love. He was to roam around the world till be should meet a
beautiful woman, wearing on her bosom a jewel in the shape of a heart;