NYDIA ENCOUNTERS JULIA. INTERVIEW OF THE HEATHEN SISTER AND CONVERTED BROTHER. AN ATHENIAN'S NOTION OF CHRISTIANITY.  
'WHAT happiness to Ione! what to be ever by the side of Glaucus, to hear his voice!—And she too can see him!'
 
Such was the soliloquy of the blind girl, as she walked alone and at to the house of her new mistress, whither Glaucus had already preceded her. Suddenly she was interrupted in her fond thoughts by a female voice.
 
'Blind flower-girl, whither goest thou? There is no pannier under thine arm; hast thou sold all thy flowers?'
 
The person thus Nydia was a lady of a handsome but a bold and unmaidenly : it was Julia, the daughter of Diomed. Her veil was half raised as she ; she was accompanied by Diomed himself, and by a slave carrying a lantern before them—the merchant and his daughter were returning home from a supper at one of their neighbors'.
 
'Dost thou not remember my voice?' continued Julia. 'I am the daughter of Diomed the wealthy.'
 
'Ah! forgive me; yes, I recall the tones of your voice. No, noble Julia, I have no flowers to sell.'
 
'I heard that thou wert purchased by the beautiful Greek Glaucus; is that true, pretty slave?' asked Julia.
 
'I serve the Neapolitan, Ione,' replied Nydia, evasively.
 
'Ah! and it is true, then...'
 
'Come, come!' interrupted Diomed, with his cloak up to his mouth, 'the night grows cold; I cannot stay here while you to that blind girl: come, let her follow you home, if you wish to speak to her.'
 
'Do, child,' said Julia, with the air of one not accustomed to be refused; 'I have much to ask of thee: come.'
 
'I cannot this night, it grows late,' answered Nydia. 'I must be at home; I am not free, noble Julia.'
 
'What, the Ione will thee?—Ay, I doubt not she is a second Thalestris. But come, then, to-morrow: do—remember I have been thy friend of old.'
 
'I will obey thy wishes,' answered Nydia; and Diomed again impatiently summoned his daughter: she was obliged to proceed, with the main question she had desired to put to Nydia unasked.
 
Meanwhile we return to Ione. The of time that had elapsed that day between the first and second visit of Glaucus had not been too spent: she had received a visit from her brother. Since the night he had assisted in saving her from the Egyptian, she had not before seen him.
 
Occupied with his own thoughts—thoughts of so serious and intense a nature—the young priest had thought little of his sister; in truth, men, perhaps of that order of mind which is ever above earth, are but little to the earthlier affections; and it had been long since Apaecides had sought those soft and friendly interchanges of thought, those sweet confidences, which in his earlier youth had bound him to Ione, and which are so natural to that endearing connection which existed between them.
 
Ione, however, had not ceased to regret his : she attributed it, at present, to the duties of his severe fraternity. And often, amidst all her bright hopes, and her new to her betrothed—often, when she thought of her brother's brow , his unsmiling lip, and bended frame, she sighed to think that the service of the gods could throw so deep a shadow over that earth which the gods created.
 
But this day when he visited her there was a strange calmness on his features, a more quiet and self-possessed expression in his sunken eyes, than she had marked for years. This apparent improvement was but momentary—it was a false calm, which the least breeze could .
 
'May the gods bless thee, my brother!' said she, embracing him.
 
'The gods! Speak not thus ; perchance there is but one God!'
 
'My brother!'
 
'What if the faith of the Nazarene be true? What if God be a monarch—One—Invisible—Alone? What if these numerous, , whose altars fill the earth, be but evil , seeking to wean us from the true ? This may be the case, Ione!'
 
'! can we believe it? or if we believed, would it not be a faith answered the Neapolitan. 'What! all this beautiful world made only human!—mountain disenchanted of its Oread—the waters of their Nymph—that beautiful of faith, which makes everything divine, the meanest flowers, bearing whispers in the faintest breeze—wouldst thou deny this, and make the earth dust and clay? No, Apaecides: all that is brightest in our hearts is that very credulity which peoples the universe with gods.'
 
Ione answered as a believer in the poesy of the old would answer. We may judge by that reply how and hard the contest which Christianity had to endure among the heathens. The was never silent; every, the most household, action of their lives was entwined with it—it was a portion of life itself, as the flowers are a part of the thyrsus. At every incident they to a god, every cup of wine was prefaced by a libation; the very garlands on their thresholds were to some divinity; their ancestors themselves, made holy, presided as Lares over their and hall. So abundant was belief with them, that in their own climes, at this hour, idolatry has never been outrooted: it changes but its objects of worship; it appeals to innumerable saints where once it resorted to divinities; and it pours its crowds, in listening , to at the of St. Januarius or St. Stephen, instead of to those of Isis or Apollo.
 
But these were not to the early the object of contempt so much as of horror. They did not believe, with the quiet scepticism of the heathen philosopher, that the gods were inventions of the priests; nor even, with the vulgar, that, according to the dim light of history, they had been mortals like themselves. They imagined the heathen divinities to be evil spirits—they transplanted to Italy and to Greece the gloomy demons of India and the East; and in Jupiter or in Mars they at the representative of Moloch or of Satan.
 
Apaecides had not yet adopted............