sallying into the moonlight; wherein with uncouth
antics and inviting pose, they disported towards
a group of trees, encircling which, and in the
chequered beams beneath their boughs, he beheld
them in Harlequin and Columbine-like appeals of
passion, or already mated and forming for the medi-
tated measure; appearing the very gang of Circe; --
and in their midst he now observed his son, the
brutish looking, cunning, and sensual Narcisse, wine-
flushed and loud, and seeming to be the mimic Comus
of the crew. As with the power of divination,
he at once comprehended the spectacle. He had ar-
rived opposite the equivocal building wherein Nar-
cisse and his companions had disappeared some hours
before, and the door of which had just been suddenly
flung open, and kindling with wrath he at once
advanced upon the bacchants in the midst of their
orgies. At the same instant, from the direction of
the city and unseen by him, a tall rider on a lofty
steed, cloak flying to the breeze, swept by like an
apparition; greeted only with a comical yell of
astonishment and derision from one of the females,
as like a spectre it swept by. But the hilarious band
before him was too much preoccupied with the per-
formance of its mockeries to have observed anything,
and the advocate, with eyes gleaming and fixed upon
his son, who now perceiving him stood terror stricken,
approached the revellers, who subsided before him, as,
with grey hair fluttering in the wind, he came
beneath the extending boughs, like some denouncing
Druid amidst the sacred oaks, his countenance in-
flamed, his whole frame seeming to shake as if in
throes to eject some foul possession; or, rather, as if

[[30]]

p029 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p030w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p031

v?