CHAPTER XXIV.
YOUNG LOVE'S DREAM.
What in all the world so sweet as young love's dream?
It is the old, old story, and yet it is as new and fresh and blissful to the soul as it will be to the end of time, or until these natures of ours are changed by the same Hand that framed them.
What more bewitching romance could cast its halo about the divine passion than that which enshrined the affection of Fred Ashman for the wonderful Ariel, the only child of the grim Haffgo, king of the Murhapas?
He had met and chatted and exchanged glances with the beauties of his own clime, and yet his heart remained unscathed.

He reverenced the sex to which his adored mother and sister belonged, and yet never had he felt the thrill that stirred his nature to the profoundest depths, when his eyes met those of the barbarian princess and the two smiled without either uttering a word.
"What care I for the gold and the diamonds and the precious stones of the Matto Grosso ?" the ardent lover asked himself; "is not she the Koh-i-noor of them all ?--the one gem whose preciousness is worth more than all the world ?" He was willing that the Professor and Jared Long should risk their lives in searching for the enchanted lake, and the burning mountain where such priceless wealth existed.

Thousands of their kind had done it before, and countless thousands would follow in their footsteps through the generations to come.
But as for _him_, a new mission had broken upon his consciousness; he had a sacred duty to perform.

Somewhere, in this broad world, a human soul is always waiting for its mate.

Perchance it never comes, and the weary one may be joined to that which heaven never intended it to be joined, or it repines and goes to the grave unloved.
Fred Ashman was as sure as if he heard a voice from the stars, telling him that Ariel, the daughter of Haffgo, was his other self.