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INTRODUCTION.

BORROWING, for a few brief moments, the wand of the sorcerer Science, who can do what other sorcerers only promise-raise up the dead-what does Science show in connection with that particular spot of ground where lies the scene of the ensuing story?

The light, which almost needs some other word to express its inconceivable splendour, is at first too dazzling for the spirit-vision to see aught that it can comprehend.

And when the eye has grown accustomed to the fierce blaze of sunshine, and to its reflections in the vast and near mirror, the sea, the difficulties, while changing, grow rather than lessen.

It is a new world that is gazed on a world in which all objects are strange, unfamiliar, and seem as unreal as a dreampicture-a world young, and revelling in its youth, and in all that youth can give it of beauty, strength, profusion, and riotous life.

Gradually this world, at first boundless as its sea and sky, narrows to the sight, and displays a forest rising from a lagoon, the water clear as crystal, and, where its colour can be seen, of the deepest blue.

A forest in which the grandeur and stately elegance of the palm-like and other lofty trees, the ideal perfection of loveliness in the tree-ferns and other low-growing plants, and the amazing fecundity of the exquisitely beautiful herbage, seem as nothing in comparison with the novelty of their forms and characters, or with the impressiveness of the fact that actual human eye has never gazed upon them, or their progeny of true lineal descent (some few fossilised forms only excepted); that they came into being-lived innumerable ages-and then died, innumerable ages before the earth knew man.

Uniform with this Volume.

MALCOLM.

By GEORGE MACDONALD.

With a Steel Engraved Portrait of the Author. Price 68.

PANDURANG HARI;

Or, Memoirs of a Hindoo.

Prefaced by Sir HENRY BARTLE FRERE.

Price 68.

HENRY S. KING & CO., LONDON.

[graphic][merged small]

ISRAEL MORT, OVERMAN

A STORY OF THE MINE

BY

JOHN SAUNDERS

AUTHOR OF 'ABEL DRAKE'S WIFE' 'HIRELL' &c.

NEW EDITION

HENRY S. KING & CO., LONDON

1877

251.

901.

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