Immediately he passed into his own room, and approaching the looking-glass beheld a sight calculated to move a statue.  His hair had become literally white, but the shades of his dark complexion, now distorted by terror and madness, flitted, as his features worked under the influence of his tremendous passions, into an expression so frightful, that deep fear came over himself.  He snatched one of his razors, and fled from the glass to the kitchen.  He looked upon the fire, and saw the white ashes lying around its edge.

“Ha!” said he, “the light is come!  I see the sign.  I am directed, and I will follow it.  There is yet one hope.  The immolation!  I shall be saved, yet so as by fire.  It is for this my hair has become white;—­the sublime warning for my self-sacrifice!  The color of ashes!—­white—­white!  It is so!  I will sacrifice my body in material fire, to save my soul from that which is eternal!  But I had anticipated the sign.  The self-sacrifice is accepted!"*

* As the reader may be disposed to consider the nature of the priest’s death an unjustifiable stretch of fiction, I have only to say in reply, that it is no fiction at all.  It is not, I believe, more than forty, or perhaps fifty, years since a priest committed his body to the flames, for the purpose of saving his soul by an incrematory sacrifice.  The object of the suicide being founded on the superstitious belief, that a priest guilty of great crimes possesses the privilege of securing salvation by self-sacrifice.  We have heard two or three legends among the people in which this principle predominated.  The outline of one of these, called “The Young Priest and Brian Braar,” was as follows:—­

A young priest on his way to the College of Valladolid, in Spain, was benighted; but found a lodging in a small inn on the roadside.  Here he was tempted by a young maiden of great beauty, who, in the moment of his weakness, extorted from him a bond signed with his blood, binding himself to her forever.  She turned out to be an evil spirit:  and the young priest proceeded to Valladolid with a heavy heart, confessed his crime to the Superior, who sent him to the Pope, who sent him to a Friar in the County of Armagh, called Brian Braar, who sent him to the devil.  The devil, on the strength of Brian Braar’s letter, gave him a warm reception, held a cabinet council immediately, and laid the despatch before his colleagues, who agreed that the claimant should get back his bond from the brimstone lady who had inveigled him.  She, however, obstinately refused to surrender it, and stood upon her bond, until threatened with being thrown three times into Brian Braar’s furnace.  This tamed her:  the man got his bond, and returned to Brian Braar on earth.  Now Brian Braar had for three years past abandoned God, and taken to the study of magic with the devil; a circumstance which accounts for his influence below.  The young priest, having possessed himself of his bond,