But with whatever emphasis he said this to himself, he still could not credit the hope for a moment: a strange shivering shot through his soul; unable to utter a word, he gazed upon the sweet speaker with a fixed eye.

She shook her head in distress, sighed from her full heart, and then proceeded in the following manner:--"We should be far superior to you, who are another race of the human family,--for we also call ourselves human beings, as we resemble them in form and features--had we not one evil peculiar to ourselves.

Both we and the beings I have mentioned as inhabiting the other elements vanish into air at death and go out of existence, spirit and body, so that no vestige of us remains; and when you hereafter awake to a purer state of being, we shall remain where sand, and sparks, and wind, and waves remain.

Thus we have no souls; the element moves us, and, again, is obedient to our will, while we live, though it scatters us like dust when we die; and as we have nothing to trouble us, we are as merry as nightingales, little gold-fishes, and other pretty children of nature.
"But all beings aspire to rise in the scale of existence higher than they are.

It was therefore the wish of my father, who is a powerful water-prince in the Mediterranean Sea, that his only daughter should become possessed of a soul, although she should have to endure many of the sufferings of those who share that gift.
"Now the race to which I belong have no other means of obtaining a soul than by forming with an individual of your own the most intimate union of love.