"Listen," said he, "and I will tell you;" and then, while we eagerly drank in his words, and strove to drink in their strange and wondrous meaning (first warning us that what he was about to say was but the text of something to be thereafter told), he leaned back upon the taffrail, and while the steamer gently plowed her way toward Acapulco and far-off Panama, said: "Fleshless, yet living, I strode through the grand old hall of a mighty temple. I had been compelled to climb the hills to reach the wall that bars the Gates of Glory, and now within my heart strange pulses beat the while.