"for the present, to make up a befitting lamentation with my household women, and those of my neighbours. Less than two hours cannot be devoted to that sacred duty. At the expiration of that period, if it please you to return, I shall be glad to see you, to learn all the particulars of the melancholy event. But before you go, not to satisfy my curiosity, (for grief has left me none,) but that of the neighbouring women, who will assemble the moment you are gone—pray inform me, has my poor husband made a will, where has he died, and of what disorder ?"

"He has made a will," replied Mourad, "which cannot fail to afford the only consolation any earthly consideration can now offer you; he died in Smyrna, and his malady was a certain disorder in the blood, which the physicians called a fever. I was with him to the last; when I return, all things shall be known to you; but, before I leave you, promise me, O sultana! to restrain your grief; youth and loveliness are only impaired by affliction, which can do no service to the memory of the dear

departed." The widow sighed, and "the inspiration of forced breath" passed current for the promise. Mourad heaved another as he thrust his feet into his slippers, and took his leave.

CHAPTER IX.

They say my sultan Achmet was a sea of liberality; happy are they who found it so. As for me, I have plunged into that ocean, and plucked not from the bottom a single pearl.

Ferdouse.

The two hours appeared an eternity of time to Mourad. He spent the tedious interval in arranging his papers and reading over the fabricated will, to see that there was no flaw to catch the notice of the hawk-eyed Cadi, without whose interference he feared nothing could be done. It was almost midnight when he returned at the appointed time to the widow. He heard the howling of the women over-head as he entered the house; the Abyssinian slave was in readiness to receive him: she conducted him by a private staircase to the upper apartments,

and having led him to the door of a small chamber she retired.

There was a lamp in an alcove at the end of the room, which gave a miserable light; it barely served to show the gloom, and to make phantoms of the shadows it projected. The deadly silence of the place, was only interrupted by the lugubrious cry of the mourners in a distant apartment, as it arose at intervals, and then died away after a few faint shrieks.

Mourad began to be impatient for the appearance of the widow; fearless as he was, in the midst of danger, of any peril there was light to look upon, he trembled, like most Moslems, at the encounter of his own solitary thoughts in any dark and dreary place. The superstition of the Turks has no poetry to redeem its horrors; gibbering gouls and shrieking gins— tearing open tombs, and mangling human bodies, are the pastimes of their hobgoblins!

The chamber into which our hero was shown, had been that of the murdered Achmet in one part lay the sword of the deceased; in another, the turban he had lately worn; the counterpart of a shawl which Mourad remembered to have

seen in the subterranean chamber at Chiblak. The object recalled the terrors of that horrible night—the fury of the tempest—when, in the words of Zebeid, "the hand of the North held the reins of the howling windi"—that hideous night, worse than Amriolkais endured the horror of, when the moon hid her face in the hands of the clouds, and "the stars were prevented from rising, as if they were bound down to a strong cliff by solid cables!"

Imagination conjured up the withered features of the spectre that sat on the stone-coffin, appalling the eye with her haggard looks, and the ear with her terrific song. And while the cries of the mourners again became audible, the death-scene of him for whom the lamentation was making, presented itself before him in all its horrors. Every instant he threw his fearful glance to the door, and then round the apartment, as if he expected to see the festering corpse of Achmet stand before him, fixing his ghastly eye on his assassin, and pointing to his gaping wounds. Now, he beheld him hovering o'er the house, warning the inmates that his enemy was within the walls of the harem—and