brought them to my tent. I put them together carefully, but they were so shattered and defaced, that I could find out but a few of the many thoughts which thou hadst graven for me. O, thou friend of my heart, while I agree with thee that the invention of graving our thoughts upon stone and sending them to our distant friends is a great benefit and a great pleasure to poor mortals, let us hope that the time will come when a better invention will be found out. Mazillah, the daughter of the priest Jehugael, thinks that we might mark our thoughts upon the leaves of the palm tree, with the juice of an herb which she has found in the valley of Zizim. I often think that the day may come when we may mark them upon a substance thin and white like the covering of our tents, with the water of some plant thick and black like the cloud in the time of thunder. The pouring out of the mind of one friend to another may then be contained in the corner of the folding of a robe, and will not be lost by the falling of a little bank of sand, or the stumbling of an ass

Few and evil, friend of my soul, are the days of our years. It was revealed to Father Adam that no man should ever live to be one thousand years old, and that in the course of ages, human life should be so shortened that few would live to the age of one hundred. If those who are now born knew that they were to live but one hundred years, could they wish to live at all? We have only time to build a few cities, to raise up families of two or three hundred sons and daughters, and lo, we are called to go down to the dark house of the grave! We see indeed our children and the children of our children for a number of generations, spreading over the country of the east, and it gives us great joy. But, alas! Where will they all go in the day of that dreadful change of which Adam spake? And how many are the signs before our eyes that such a change is coming. We have seen both the greater and the lesser Lights of Heaven darkened for a time. The greater Light does not shine on every day as it did in Eden. In the last year it was darkened by black shades during more than twenty days. Instead of the pure and soft dews that were wont every evening and every morning to refresh the herbs and the plants, we sometimes suffer many evils from the shower, the tempest, or the whirlwind. The east wind has sometimes blown during the greatest part of a day, and has made the head dizzy and the

heart faint. The heat of the day and the night is not always the same, but the flowers are at times blasted, and the water gives us pain when we touch it with our hands. And the sons and daughters of men are no longer so just and good as they were in the years that are past. Those who were called the Sons of GOD have become the Sons of the Serpent. They take away in the night what is not their own, and they scoff at the rulers of the people when they are called upon to return their plunder. Our daughters do not love their parents and their brothers as of old, but they love the Sons of the Serpent, because they cover their bodies with the skins of the beautiful beasts that are caught in the great woods where men can never fix their habitations, and adorn their heads with the bright feathers of the birds that are brought from the great plains near the rising of the Sun. Oh, friend of my soul, may thy daughters never love the Sons of the Serpent! May thy wife be as the green plant that embraceth the tree of the wood, and may thy tent be the habitation of doves!

*

EPISTLE III.

From the village of Vehajethah, near the great rock of Hakkedosha, at the bottom of the mountain of Tzirin, the first day of the first new moon, in the year of the Creation of Adam and Eve, One Thousand and Fourteen.

JETHU, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, to Mishloach, the son of Jadam, the son of Cain, at the walled town of Ziphon, upon the bank of the king of rivers, Euphrates, Peace.

The summer of my life is passing away, like the flight of the roe from the hunter upon the plain of Kum. I love to call to remembrance the days of my youth. Six hundred years have passed away since I visited thy father's father, at Abim-Ed, in the land of Nod. He still mourned for the death of Abel. He said that his punishment was greater than he could bear. To be a fugitive and a vagabond upon the face of the earth was one of the least of his afflictions, because all the sons and daughters of Adam are fugitives from the garden of Eden. But the mark with which the LORD had marked him, that no man who met him in the way should kill him, made all his days the days of grief, and all his nights the nights of mourning. He said that the worm of sorrow continually gnawed his heart. He did not dare to put an end to his own life, for the

LORD God had forbidden it. He had hoped that the children of Abel would slay him, but they feared the LORD, and when they beheld the black mark upon his forehead, they would turn from the path in which he walked, and pass by him on the other side, In the morning he prayed that it might be evening, and in the evening he prayed that it might be morning. Am I doomed, he exclaimed, to live eight hundred years beneath the frowns of the Almighty? Eight hundred years will to me seem longer than eight hundred generations to the other children of Adam. His repentance appeared to be sincere, and his devotion warm, but his grief was not to be consoled. His hours were divided between labour and prayer. Cities and villages were rising up around him. His fields were tilled with care, and his crops of corn were rich. He complained that his corn and vines were often blasted by the breath of Heaven, but his children told me that it was but the imagination of his gloomy mind. He said that to the other children of Adam and Eve the hour of sorrow was but as the swift little cloud, of the colour of the rose, that made dark a little spot in the sky of the east, which fled away before the first beam of the morning sun; but that his life would be one long day of grief, without hope, as if the sun and moon and stars should be stricken out of the firmament for many ages!