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Pendlam, who had spoken doubtingly, seemed encouraged.

“Symbols are the highest expression of spiritual thought. Both words and pictures are used. They are the language of the spirit, which only the same spirit can understand. Look here, and you will see some symbols of a very astonishing character.”

“Astonishing,” said I, “is a mild word!”

“And what is equally astonishing,” added the eager reformer, “is the manner in which they are produced. The hand is moved to write or draw them spontaneously. The symbol comes first, the interpretation afterwards. Here is a vulture soaring away with a lamb. It has a meaning.”

“A deep meaning!” I added. “We have known such a vulture!”

“Here,” he cried,—too excited to heed any words but his own,—“are swine feeding upon golden fruit”

“Oh, the swine! Oh, the precious, wasted, golden fruit!”

“Here is one in words; it reads, Beware of falling from a balloon. It requires a peculiar experience,” added Pendlam, with a smile, “to enable one to understand that beautiful symbol.”

“Perhaps I have not had the requisite experience; but”—I laid my hand on Pendlam’s shoulder—“I know a man who has fallen from several balloons!”

“Here is one,” said Pendlam, turning to the table, “which I have just drawn. I was trying to get at its meaning when you came in.” He showed me a sketch consisting of a number of zigzag lines, joined one to another, and tending towards a circle.

“My dear John Henry,” said I, “any person who has watched your course for the last four or five years will readily see the meaning of that symbol. It is a map of your voyage of discoveries.”

“Such tacking and shifting?” queried Pendlam, with a smile commiserating my ignorance.

“Just such tacking and shifting. If you had possessed a good compass, it would have shown you.”

Pendlam caught at the word compass. “It is singular;—you must have some spiritual perception;—it was written through my hand nine days ago, Purchase a compass. Here is the writing; I placed it upon the wall as a symbol; and I have intended buying a compass as soon as I could get the means.”

“Ah, John Henry,” said I, “there is more in your symbols than you suppose. You want no purchasable compass.”

Pendlam rewarded my simplicity with another pitying smile.

“Here,” said he, “you who know so much of symbols, explain this. Avoid the shores of Old Spain. I have not yet penetrated its meaning.”

“Leave it,” I replied, “with the unexplained Pythagorean symbol touching abstinence from beans. Perhaps future events will reveal it.”

Pendlam smiled as before. But was I not right? Did not lamentable events in the not far-off future give to the symbol a melancholy significance?

“Come,” I said, “leave these abstruse studies; take off that symbolic coat, that tinsel crown; wash, comb your hair, and walk with me.”

“I should enjoy a walk,” replied Pendlam; “but I am directed to retain these symbols upon my person, and you would hardly wish me to appear in the street with them.”

“Directed!—by what authority?”

“By the Spirit. Some beautiful use is to be fulfilled. I see where you are,” added Pendlam;—“from your stand-point it must look absurd enough.”

I sat down, and endeavoured to reason with him. But I found it impossible for a person upon my plane to reach with any argument a person upon his. In vain I recapitulated his successive trials and failures.

“It is true,” he confessed, “I have been called to pass through some strange experiences. But all were necessary steps; and I have now reached a stand-point from which I can look back and see in its indisputable place every grade of the progressive ascent. There has been only apparent failure. Our attempted Association was a necessary foreshadowing of what remains to be unfolded; a prophetic symbol. We have all been taught great lessons.”

“And the vulture and the lamb!” I said, sternly; “where are they?”

“I perceive,” answered Pendlam, charitably, “you do not understand.”

“It is you,” I cried, “who have failed to understand your own symbols. To use plain language, then, where is Susan? She is the lamb that was entrusted to your keeping, and that you suffered the obscene bird to carry away!”

“You are pleased to employ harsh terms,” said Pendlam, meekly. “Susan has done well; she has followed her attractions, and that is obedience to the Spirit. Perfect freedom is essential to progression. Consequently, above a certain plane, monogamy, which has undeniable primitive uses, ceases to exist. The laws of chemical affinity teach this by analogy. When the mutual impartations which result from the conjunction of positive and negative have blended in a state of equilibrium, there is consequent repulsion, and the law of harmonies ordains new combinations. You see where I am,” said Pendlam.

Disheartened and sorrowful, I set out to go. At the door I turned back.

“Can I do anything for you, John Henry?”

“Not unless”—Pendlam hesitated a moment—“if you have a dollar to spare?”

I gave him a bank-bill. As he leaned forward to receive it, he struck his head against the suspended key.

“Another symbol,” I said. “Break not your brains upon the key of brass.”

He scratched his head, rearranged his tinsel, and smiling, advanced to show me the stairs. I looked back once: there crowned he stood, in his symbolic coat, with the green crescent and blue door on the shoulders; and as a gust from the stairway blew open the garment, I beheld a great yellow heart on his breast. That picture remained impressed upon my vision. In the street, I recalled the room, the drawings, the inscriptions,—all so tragical and saddening! I had not proceeded far, when, moved by greater compassion, I turned and retraced my steps. At the door of the house, I saw the servant girl who had admitted me coming out with a bottle, and thought it the same I had seen lying empty under Pendlam’s table. I followed her into a grocery on the corner. She called for gin, and paid for it out of my bank-bill.

I now changed my mind, and went to consult Horatio. It was concluded that Pendlam’s old habits of thought and associations ought to be entirely broken up. Deserted, destitute, dependent, he condescended, after long holding out against us, to listen to what we proposed. Hearing of a vacancy in a newspaper office in a western city, we had procured for him the situation. Not without a struggle, he consented to accept it, abandoned his darling reformatory projects, and set out for his new sphere.

His position was that of subordinate writer; and for a time he maintained it with considerable ability. But he grew restless under restraint; and at length, taking advantage of the managing editor’s absence, he published articles on prohibited subjects, which lost the paper half its subscribers, and him his situation. When next heard of, he was gaining a meagre subsistence by writing theatrical puffs,—employment for which he was indebted to the kindness of a certain influential actress named Kellerton.

In the mean time Susan returned from her unhappy wanderings; and her mother’s family, seizing upon her like wolves, hid her from the world in their den. And I was pleased not long after to read that an individual named Clodman, a noted swindler, had recently been shot in a street-fight in St. Louis, by a husband whose domestic peace he had disturbed.

The last word of all, that ends this strange, eventful, and, alas! too true history, remains to be said.

For some months, we had heard nothing of Pendlam. But last week I received a bundle of Roman Catholic publications, one of which contained an article proclaiming a miraculous conversion of the distinguished reformer, and thereby greatly glorifying Catholicism.

The same mail brought me a letter from the convert.

“At last,” he wrote, “I have found peace in the bosom of the Holy Catholic Church. All my previous experiences were necessary to lead me where I am. This is the divine association I was so long seeking elsewhere in vain; I find in its forms the true symbols of a universal religion; and I now perceive that the seeming errors, in which I was for a time permitted to stray, were wisely designed to convince me of the sublime truth, that celibacy is the single condition befitting a holy apostolic teacher.”

Amid the flood of reflections that rushed upon me, arose prominent the image of poor Pendlam’s unexplained symbol: “Avoid the shores of old Spain.” Had it not now received its interpretation? The tossed voyager, failing to make the continent of truth, but beating hither and thither amid the reefs and breakers of dangerous coasts, mistaking many islands for the main, and drifting on unknown seas, had at last steered straight to the old Catholic shores, from which the great discoverers had sailed so many years before.

BRITISH INDIA.

The year 1757 was one of the gloomiest ever known to England. At home, the government was in a state of utter confusion, though the country was at war with France, and France was in alliance with Austria; these two nations having departed from their policy of two centuries and a half, in order that they might crush Frederic of Prussia, England’s ally. Frederic was defeated at Kolin, by the Austrians, on the 18th of June, and a Russian army was in possession of East Prussia. A German army in British pay, and commanded by the “Butcher” hero of Culloden, was beaten in July, and capitulated in September. In America, the pusillanimity of the English commanders led to terrible disasters, among which the loss of Fort William Henry, and the massacre of its garrison, were conspicuous events. In India, the English were engaged in a doubtful contest with the viceroy of Bengal, who was supported by the French. Even the navy of England appeared at that time to have lost its sense of superiority; for not only had Admiral Byng just been shot for not behaving with proper spirit, but a combined expedition against the coast of France ended in signal failure, and Admiral Holburne declined to attack a French fleet off Louisburg. No wonder that the British people readily believed an author who then published a work to establish the agreeable proposition, “that they were a race of cowards and scoundrels; that nothing could save them; that they were on the point of being enslaved by their enemies, and that they richly deserved their fate.” Such a succession of disasters might well discourage a people, some of whom could recollect the long list of victories which commenced with Blenheim and closed with Malplaquet, and by which the arrogance of the Grand Monarque had been punished.

Yet it is from this very year of misfortune that the power of modern England must take its date. “Adversity,” said El Hakim to the Knight of the Leopard, “is like the period of the former and of the latter rain,—cold, comfortless, unfriendly to man and to animal; yet from that season have their birth the flower and the fruit, the date, the rose, and the pomegranate.” In the summer of 1757 was formed that ministry which succeeded in carrying England’s power and glory to heights which they did not reach even under the Protectorship of Cromwell or the rule of Godolphin. Then were commenced those measures which ended in the expulsion of the French from North America, and gave to England a territory here which may perpetuate her institutions for ages after they shall have ceased to be known in the mother-land. Then was America conquered in Germany, and not only was Frederic so assisted as to be able to contend successfully against the three great houses of Bourbon, Habsburg, and Romanoff, and a horde of lesser dynasties, but British armies, at Minden and Creveldt,