My host was watching me attentively, no doubt reading my thoughts, for as I turned round he asked if I "liked the contrast." To be quite candid, I was forced to own myself greatly wondering "that a den so well fitted for the latitude of Paris should be stumbled upon away up here so near the Pole."

"Hardly in keeping with 'the eternal fitness of things,' eh?"

"Precisely so."

"You think, then, because a fellow chooses to live in barbarous Greenland, he must needs turn barbarian?"

"Not exactly that, but we are in the habit of associating the appreciation of comfort and luxury with the desire for social intercourse,—certainly not with banishment like this."

"Then you would be inclined to think there is something unnatural, in short, mysterious, in my being here,—tastes, fancies, inclinations, and all?"

"I confess it would so strike me, if I took the liberty to speculate upon it."

"Very far from the truth, I do assure you. I am not obliged to be here any more than you are. I came from pure choice, and am at liberty to return when I please. In truth, I do go home with the ship to Copenhagen, once in three or four years, and spend a winter there, living the while in a den much like what you here see; but I am always glad enough to get back again. The salary which I receive from the government does not support me as I live, so you see that is not a motive. But I am perfectly independent, have capital health, lots of adventure, hardship enough (for you must know that, if I do sleep under a sky-blue canopy, I am esteemed one of the most hardy men in all Greenland) to satisfy the most insatiate appetite and perverse disposition."

"Sufficient reason, I should say, for a year or so, but hardly one would think, for a lifetime."

"Why not?"

"Because the novelty of adventure wears off in a little time. Good health never gives us satisfaction, for we do not give it thought until we lose it, so that can never be an impelling motive; and as for independence, what is that, when one can never be freed from himself? In short, I should say one so circumstanced as you are would die of ennui; that his mind, constantly thrown back upon itself, must, sooner or later, result in a weariness even worse than death itself. However, I am only curious, not critical."

"But you forget these shelves. Those books are my friends; of them I never grow weary, they never grow weary of me; we understand each other perfectly,—they talk to me when I would listen, they sing to me when I would be charmed, they play for me when I would be amused. Ah! my dear sir, this country is great as all countries are great, each in its way; and this is a great country to read books in. Upon my word, I wonder everybody don't fill ships with books and come up here, burn the ships, as did the great Spaniard, and each spend the remainder of his days in devouring his ship-load of books."

"A pretty picture of the country, truly; but let me ask how often do books reach you?"

"Once a year,—when the Danish ship comes out to bring us bread, sugar, coffee, coal, and such-like things, and to take home the few little trifles, such as furs, oil, and fish, which the natives have picked up in the interval."

"Books to the contrary, I should say the ship would not return more than once without me, were I in your situation."

"So you would think me a sensible fellow, no doubt, if I would pick up this box and carry it off to Paris, or may be to New York?"

"That's exactly what I was thinking; or rather it would certainly have appeared to me more reasonable if you had built it there in the first instance."

"Quite the contrary, I do assure you,—quite the contrary. Indeed, I can prove to your entire satisfaction that I am a very sensible man; but wait until I have shown you all my possessions. Will you look at my farm?"

Farm!—well, this was, after all, exhibiting some claims of the country to the consideration of a civilized man. A farm in Greenland was something I was hardly prepared for.

The Doctor now rose and led the way to the rear of the house, into a yard about eighty feet square, enclosed by a high board fence.

"This is my farm," said the Doctor.

"Where?"

"Here, look. It isn't a large one." And he pointed to a patch of earth about thirty feet long by four wide, enclosed with boards and covered over with glass. Under the glass were growing lettuce, radishes, and pepper-grass, all looking as bright and fresh and green and well contented as if they, like the man for whose benefit they grew, cared little where they sprouted, so only they grew. The ten round red radishes of the recent luncheon were accounted for.

"So you see," exclaimed the Doctor, "something besides a lover of books can take root in this country. Are you not growing reconciled to it? To be sure they are fed on pap from home; but so does the farmer who cultivates them get his books from the same quarter."

"How is that? Do you mean to say you bring the earth they grow in from home?"

"Even so. This is good rich Jutland earth, brought in barrels by ship from Copenhagen."

An imported farm! One more novelty.

"Now you shall see my barn";—and we passed over to a little tightly made building in the opposite corner, where the first thing that greeted my ears was the bleating of goats and the grunting of pigs; and as the door was opened, I heard the cackling and flutter of chickens. Twenty chickens, two pigs, and three goats!

"All brought from Copenhagen with the farm";—and the Doctor began to talk to them in a very familiar manner in the Danish tongue. They all recognized the kindly voice of their master, and flocked round him to be fed; and while this was being done I observed that he had provided for the safety of his brood by securing in the centre of their house a large stove, which was now cold, but which in the winter must give them abundant heat. And so the Doctor, besides his round red radishes and his nice fresh butter, had pork and milk and eggs of native growth.

The next object of interest to attract attention was the Doctor's "smoke-house," then in full operation. This was simply a large hogshead, with one head pierced with holes and the other head knocked out. The end without a head was set upon a circle of stones, which supported it about a foot above the ground, and inside of this circle a great volume of smoke was being generated, and which came puffing out through the holes in the head above. Inside of this simple contrivance were suspended a number of fine salmon, the delicate flesh of which was being dried by the heat, and penetrated by the sweet aroma of the smoke, which came puffing through the holes. The smoke arose from a smouldering fire of the leaves and branches of the Andromeda (Andromeda tetrigona), the heather of Greenland,—a trailing plant with a pretty purple blossom, which grows in sheltered places in great abundance. Besides moss, this is the only vegetable production of North Greenland that will burn, and it is sometimes used by the natives for fuel, after it is dried by the sun, for which purpose it is torn up and spread over the rocks. The perfume of the smoke is truly delicious, which accounts for the excellent flavor of the salmon which the Doctor had given me for lunch. Nothing, indeed, could exceed the delicacy of the fish thus prepared.

The inspection of the Doctor's garden, or "farm," as he facetiously called it, occupied us during the remainder of the afternoon; and so novel was everything to me, from the Doctor down to his vegetables and perfumed fish, that the time passed away unnoticed, and I was quite astonished when Sophy came to announce "dinner."

We were soon seated at the table where we had been before, and Sophy served the dinner. Her soup was excellent, the trout were of fine quality and well cooked, the haunch was done to a turn, the wines were this time rightly tempered, the champagne needed not to be iced, more of the round red radishes appeared in season, and then followed lettuce and cheese and coffee, and then we found ourselves at another game of billiards, and at length were settled for the evening in the Doctor's study, one on either side of a table, on which stood all the ingredients for an arrack punch, and a bundle of cigars.

Our conversation naturally enough ran upon the affairs of the big world on the other side of the Arctic Circle,—upon its politics and literature and science and art, passing lightly from one to the other, lingering now and then over some book which we had mutually fancied. I found my companion perfectly posted up to within a year, and inquired how he managed so well. "Ah! you must know," answered he, "that is a clever little illusion of mine. I'm always precisely one year behind the rest of the world. The Danish ship brings me a file of papers for the past twelve months, the principal reviews and periodicals, the latest maps, such books as I have sent for the year previous, and, beside this, the bookseller and my other home friends make me up an assortment of what they think will please me. Now, you see, in devouring this, I pursue an absolute method. The books, of course, I take up as the fancy pleases me; but the reviews, periodicals, and newspapers I turn over to Sophy, and the faithful creature places on my breakfast-table every morning exactly what was published that day one year before. Clever, isn't it? You see I get every day the news, and go through the drama of the year with perhaps quite as much satisfaction as they who live the passing days in the midst of the occurring events. Each day's paper opens a new act in the play, and what matters it that the 'news' is one year old? It is none the less news to me; and, besides, are not Gibbon, Shakespeare, and Mother Goose still more ancient?"

I could but smile at this ingenious device; and the Doctor, seeing plainly that I was deeply interested in his novel mode of life, loosened a tongue which, in truth, needed little encouragement, and rattled away over the rough and smooth of his Greenland experiences, with an enjoyment on his part perhaps scarcely less than mine; for it was easy to see that his love of wild adventure kept pace with his love of comfort, and that he heartily enjoyed the exposures of his career and the reputation which his hardihood had acquired for him. I perceived, too, that he possessed a warm and vivid imagination, and that, clothing everything he saw and everything he did with a fitting sentiment of strength or beauty, he had blended wild nature and his own strange life into a romantic scheme which completely filled his fancy,—apparently, at least, leaving nothing unsupplied,—and this he enjoyed to the very bottom of his soul.

The hours glided swiftly away as we sat sipping our punch and smoking our cigars in that quaint study of the Doctor's, chatting of this and of that; and a novel feature of the evening was, that, as we talked on and on, the light grew not dim with the passing hours; for when the hand of a Danish clock which ticked above the mantel told nine, and ten, and eleven o'clock, it was still broad day; and then in the full blaze of sunshine the clock rang out the "witching hour" of midnight. The sun, low down upon the northern horizon, poured his bright rays over the hills and sea, throwing the dark shadow of the mountains over the town, but illuminating everything to right and left with that soft and pleasant light which we so often see at home in the early morning of the spring.

After the clock had struck twelve, we threw our fur cloaks over our shoulders, and strolled out into this strange midnight. Passing through the town, I remarked the quiet which everywhere prevailed, and how all nature seemed to have caught the inspiration of the hour. Not a soul was stirring abroad; the dogs, crouching in clusters, were all asleep; and it seemed as if my little vessel lay under the shadows of the cliffs with a consciousness that midnight is a solemn thing even in sunshine; and never did the sun shine more brightly, or a more brilliantly illuminated landscape give stronger evidence of day. But wearied nature had sought repose, even though no "sable cloud with silver lining" turned upon the world its darkening shadow,—for the hour of rest was come. Walking on over the rough rocks, we came at length upon the sea, and I noticed that the very birds which were wont to paddle about in great flocks upon the waters, or fly gayly through the air, had crawled upon the shore, and, tucking their heads beneath their wings, had gone to sleep. Even the little flowers and blades of grass seemed to droop, as if wearied with the long hours of the day, and, defying the restless sun to rob them of their natural repose, had fallen to sleep with the beasts and birds. The very sea itself seemed to have caught the infection of the hour, dissolving in its blue depths the golden clouds of day.

The night was far from cold, and, selecting the most tempting and sunny spot, we sat down upon a rock close beside the sea, watching the gentle wavelets playing on the sand, and the changing light as the sun rolled on, glistening upon the hills and upon the icebergs, which, in countless numbers, lay upon the watery plain before us, like great monoliths of Parian marble, waiting but for the sculptor's chisel to stand forth in fluted pillar and solid architrave,—floating Parthenons and Pantheons and Temples of the Sun.

The scene was favorable to the conversation which had been broken off when we left the study, and the Doctor came back to it of his own accord. I was much absorbed with the grandeur of this midnight scene, and had remained for some time quiet. My companion, breaking in abruptly, said: "I think I promised to prove to you that I am the most sensible fellow alive. Now let me tell you, to begin with, that I would not exchange this view for any other I have ever seen. It is one of which I am very fond; for at this hour the repose which you here see is frequently repeated; and, to compare big things with little, it might be likened to some huge lion sleeping over his prey, which he is not yet prepared to eat, quick to catch the first sound of movement. There is something truly terrible in this untamed nature. Man's struggle here gives him something to rejoice in; and I would not barter it for the effeminate life to which I should be destined at home, on any account whatever. Perhaps, if I should there be compelled absolutely to earn my daily bread, the case might be different, for enforced occupation is quite too sober an affair to give time for much reflection; but I should most likely lead an idle sort of life there, and should simply live without—so far as I can see—a motive. I should encounter few perils, have few sorrows, fewer disappointments, and want for nothing,—nothing, indeed, but temptation to exert myself, or prove my own manhood in its strength, or enjoy the luxury of risking the precious breath of life, which is so little worth, and which is so easily knocked away. You have seen one side of me,—how I live. Well, I enjoy life and make the most of it, after my own fashion, as everybody should do. If it is a luxurious fashion, as you are pleased to say, it but gives me a keener relish for the opposite; and that it does not unfit me for encountering the hardships of the field is proved by the reputation for endurance which I have among the natives. If I sleep between well-aired sheets one night, I can coil myself up among my dogs on the ice-fields the next, and sleep there as well,—I care not if it's as cold as the frigid circle of Lucifer. If I have a penchant for Burgundy, and like to drink it out of French glass, I can drink train-oil out of a tin cup when I am cold and hungry, and never murmur. I like well-fitting clothes, but rough furs suit me just as well in season. Why, it would make you laugh fit to kill yourself to see these Danish workingmen,—the laborers, you know, with whom I sometimes travel,—fellows that can't read nor write, poor mechanics, rough sailors, 'hewers of wood and drawers of water' generally for this poor settlement,—who never tasted Burgundy in all their lives, and would rather have one keg of corn brandy than a tun of it, and who never took their frugal fare off anything more tempting than tin. Do you think that these people can, under any circumstances, be induced to strengthen their limbs with eating blubber or drinking train-oil? Not a bit of it. Do you think they can be induced to sleep outside of their own not overly elegant lodgings, without groaning, and everlastingly desiring to get back again? Not they."

I could not help asking the Doctor what impelled him to exposure, of which he had grown so fond.

"The motives are various. I have done a good deal of exploring, have reached many of the glaciers, have dabbled in natural history, meteorology, magnetism, &c., &c., besides making many photographs and geographical surveys, and have sent home to various societies and museums many curiosities and much information. My name, as you know, stands well enough among the dons of science. But apart from this, my duties require me to travel about at all times and all seasons. You must know that everybody in this country lives upon the shore, and therefore the settlements are reached only by the sea. In the winter I travel over the ice with my dog sledge, and in the summer, when the ice has broken up, I go from place to place in that little five-ton yacht which you saw lying in the harbor. Sometimes I go from choice, stopping at the villages, and exhibiting my professional abilities upon Dane or native, as the case may be. Often I am sent for. The Greenlanders don't like to die any better than other people, and they all have an impression that, if Dr. Molke only looks upon them, they are safe. So if an old woman but gets the belly-ache, away goes her son or husband for the Doctor. Perhaps it is in summer, and the distance may be a hundred miles or more. No matter, he gets into his kayak and paddles through all sorts of weather, and, at the rate of seven knots an hour, comes for me. Glad of the excuse for a change, to say nothing (and the less perhaps any of us say on that score the better) of the claims of humanity, I send Sophy after Adam (a converted native), and directly along comes Adam with his son Carl; and my medicine and instrument cases, my gun and rifle, and a plentiful supply of ammunition, a tent, and some fur bedding, a lamp, and other camp fixtures, and a little simple food, are put into the boat, and off we go. Perhaps a gale springs up, and we are forced to make a harbor in some little island; or perhaps it falls calm, and we crawl into one, under oars. It is sure to be alive with ducks and geese and snipe. The shooting is superb. Happen what may, come storm or calm or fine weather, though often wet and cold, and frequently in danger, yet I have a grand time of it. I may be back in a day, two days, a week, or I may be gone a month. Then the winter comes back, and I have again to answer another summons. The same traps are put on the sledge, to which are harnessed the twelve finest dogs in the town,—my own team,—and, at the wildest pace with which this wolfish herd can rush along, Adam guides me to my destination. Perhaps it may be early in the winter, and the ice is in places thin. We very likely break through, and get wet, and are in danger of freezing. Perhaps we reach a crack which we cannot pass, and have to hold on, possibly in a hut of snow, waiting for the frost to build a bridge for us to pass. This is the wildest and most dangerous of my experiences,—this dog-sledging it from place to place in the early or late winter,—and I have had many wild adventures. In the middle of the winter, when it is dark pretty much all the time, and the snow is hard and crisp, and the clear, cold bracing air makes the blood run freely through the veins, is the best time for travelling; for then we may start a bear, and be pretty sure of catching him before he gets on rotten ice or across a crack defying us in the pursuit."

By this time the sun had begun to climb above the hills, and the shadow of the cliffs had passed over the town, so we stole back again to the Doctor's house. The Doctor insisted that I should not sleep on board, so we returned to the study, where I was soon wrapt in a sound sleep on the Doctor's "shake-down," from which I never once awoke until there came a loud tapping on the door.

"Who's there?"

"Sophy."

"What's Sophy want?"

"Breakfast."

Breakfast indeed! It was hard to believe that I was to come back to the experiences of life under such a summons, for I had dreamed that I was on a visit to the Man in the Moon, and was enjoying a genuine surprise at finding him happy and well contented, seated in the centre of an extinct volcano, with all the riches of the great satellite gathered round him, hanging in tempting clusters on its horns.

But my eyes at length were opened wide enough to see, near by, the very terrestrial ruins of our evening's pastime; and if these had left any doubts upon my mind as to the reality of my present situation, those doubts would certainly have been removed by the cheerful voice of the Doctor; for a loud "Good morning!" came from out the painted chamber, and from beneath the sky-blue canopy a graceful query of the night. "What of the night, sleeper?—what of the night?" Then I was quickly out upon the floor, and dressed, and in the cosey little room where the fruits and flowers were hanging on the wall, and where the bright face of Sophy, and aromatic coffee, and a charming little breakfast, were awaiting us with a kindly welcome.

Breakfast over, I left the Doctor to expend his skill and knowledge on a patient who had sent to claim his services, and strolled out over the rocks behind the town,—wondering all the while at the strangeness of the human fancy and its power on the will; and I reflected, too, and remembered that, in the explanation of the satisfying character of the life which my new-found friend was leading, there had been no clew given to the first great motive which had destined such a finely organized and altogether splendid man to such a career. Was he exempt from the lot of other mortals, or must he too own, like all the rest of us, when we own the truth, that every firm step we ever made in those days of our early lives when steps were critical, was made to please a woman, to win her slightest praise, to heal a wound or drown a sorrow of her making? I would have given much to have the question answered, for then a thing now mysterious would have become as plain as day; but there was no one there to heed the question, or to give the answer, and I could only wander on over the rough rocks, wondering more and more.



A STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

One morning last April, as I was passing through Boston Common, which lies pleasantly between my residence and my office, I met a gentleman lounging along The Mall. I am generally preoccupied when walking, and often thrid my way through crowded streets without distinctly observing a single soul. But this man's face forced itself upon me, and a very singular face it was. His eyes were faded, and his hair, which he wore long, was flecked with gray. His hair and eyes, if I may say so, were seventy years old, the rest of him not thirty. The youthfulness of his figure, the elasticity of his gait, and the venerable appearance of his head, were incongruities that drew more than one pair of curious eyes towards him. He was evidently an American,—the New England cut of countenance is unmistakable,—evidently a man who had seen something of the world; but strangely old and young.

Before reaching the Park Street gate, I had taken up the thread of thought which he had unconsciously broken; yet throughout the day this old young man, with his unwrinkled brow and silvered locks, glided in like a phantom between me and my duties.

The next morning I again encountered him on The Mall. He was resting lazily on the green rails, watching two little sloops in distress, which two ragged ship-owners had consigned to the mimic perils of the Pond. The vessels lay becalmed in the middle of the ocean, displaying a tantalizing lack of sympathy with the frantic helplessness of the owners on shore. As the gentleman observed their dilemma, a light came into his faded eyes, then died out, leaving them drearier than before. I wondered if he, too, in his time, had sent out ships that drifted and drifted and never came to port; and if these poor toys were to him types of his own losses.

"I would like to know that man's story," I said, half aloud, halting in one of those winding paths which branch off from the quietness of the Pond, and end in the rush and tumult of Tremont Street.

"Would you?" replied a voice at my side. I turned and faced Mr. H——, a neighbor of mine, who laughed heartily at finding me talking to myself. "Well," he added, reflectingly, "I can tell you this man's story; and if you will match the narrative with anything as curious, I shall be glad to hear it."

"You know him then?"

"Yes and no. I happened to be in Paris when he was buried."

"Buried!"

"Well, strictly speaking, not buried; but something quite like it. If you've a spare half-hour," continued my interlocutor, "we'll sit on this bench, and I will tell you all I know of an affair that made some noise in Paris a couple of years ago. The gentleman himself, standing yonder, will serve as a sort of frontispiece to the romance,—a full-page illustration, as it were."

The following pages contain the story that Mr. H—— related to me. While he was telling it, a gentle wind arose; the miniature sloops drifted feebly about the ocean; the wretched owners flew from point to point, as the deceptive breeze promised to waft the barks to either shore; the early robins trilled now and then from the newly fringed elms; and the old young man leaned on the rail in the sunshine, wearily, little dreaming that two gossips were discussing his affairs within twenty yards of him.

* * * * *

Three people were sitting in a chamber whose one large window overlooked the Place Vendome. M. Dorine, with his back half turned on the other two occupants of the apartment, was reading the Moniteur, pausing from time to time to wipe his glasses, and taking scrupulous pains not to glance towards the lounge at his right, on which were seated Mademoiselle Dorine and a young American gentleman, whose handsome face rather frankly told his position in the family. There was not a happier man in Paris that afternoon than Philip Wentworth. Life had become so delicious to him that he shrunk from looking beyond to-day. What could the future add to his full heart? what might it not take away? In certain natures the deepest joy has always something of melancholy in it, a presentiment, a fleeting sadness, a feeling without a name. Wentworth was conscious of this subtile shadow, that night, when he rose from the lounge, and thoughtfully held Julie's hand to his lip for a moment before parting. A careless observer would not have thought him, as he was, the happiest man in Paris.

M. Dorine laid down his paper and came forward. "If the house," he said, "is such as M. Martin describes it, I advise you to close with him at once. I would accompany you, Philip, but the truth is, I am too sad at losing this little bird to assist you in selecting a cage for her. Remember, the last train for town leaves at five. Be sure not to miss it; for we have seats for M. Sardou's new comedy to-morrow night. By to-morrow night," he added laughingly, "little Julie here will be an old lady, ——'t is such an age from now until then."

The next morning the train bore Philip to one of the loveliest spots within thirty miles of Paris. An hour's walk through green lanes brought him to M. Martin's estate. In a kind of dream the young man wandered from room to room, inspected the conservatory, the stables, the lawns, the strip of woodland through which a merry brook sang to itself continually; and, after dining with M. Martin, completed the purchase, and turned his steps towards the station, just in time to catch the express train.

As Paris stretched out before him, with its million lights twinkling in the early dusk, and its sharp spires here and there pricking the sky, it seemed to Philip as if years had elapsed since he left the city. On reaching Paris he drove to his hotel, where he found several letters lying on the table. He did not trouble himself even to glance at their superscriptions as he threw aside his travelling surtout for a more appropriate dress.

If, in his impatience to see Mademoiselle Dorine, the cars had appeared to walk, the fiacre which he had secured at the station appeared to creep. At last it turned into the Place Vendome, and drew up before M. Dorine's residence. The door opened as Philip's foot touched the first step. The servant silently took his cloak and hat, with a special deference, Philip thought; but was he not now one of the family?

"M. Dorine," said the servant slowly, "is unable to see Monsieur at present. He wishes Monsieur to be shown up to the salon."

"Is Mademoiselle—"

"Yes, Monsieur."

"Alone?"

"Alone, Monsieur," repeated the man, looking curiously at Philip, who could scarcely repress an exclamation of pleasure.

It was the first time that such a privilege had been accorded him. His interviews with Julie had always taken place in the presence of M. Dorine, or some member of the household. A well-bred Parisian girl has but a formal acquaintance with her lover.

Philip did not linger on the staircase; his heart sang in his bosom as he flew up the steps, two at a time. Ah! this wine of air which one drinks at twenty, and seldom after! He hastened through the softly lighted hall, in which he detected the faint scent of her favorite flowers, and stealthily opened the door of the salon.

The room was darkened. Underneath the chandelier stood a slim black casket on trestles. A lighted candle, a crucifix, and some white flowers were on a table near by. Julie Dorine was dead.

When M. Dorine heard the indescribable cry that rang through the silent house, he hurried from the library, and found Philip standing like a ghost in the middle of the chamber.

It was not until long afterwards that Wentworth learned the details of the calamity that had befallen him. On the previous night Mademoiselle Dorine had retired to her room in seemingly perfect health. She dismissed her maid with a request to be awakened early the next morning. At the appointed hour the girl entered the chamber. Mademoiselle Dorine was sitting in an arm-chair, apparently asleep. The candle had burnt down to the socket; a book lay half open on the carpet at her feet. The girl started when she saw that the bed had not been occupied, and that her mistress still wore an evening dress. She rushed to Mademoiselle Dorine's side. It was not slumber. It was death.

Two messages were at once despatched to Philip, one to the station at G——, the other to his hotel. The first missed him on the road, the second he had neglected to open. On his arrival at M. Dorine's house, the servant, under the supposition that Wentworth had been advised of Mademoiselle Dorine's death, broke the intelligence with awkward cruelty, by showing him directly to the salon.

Mademoiselle Dorine's wealth, her beauty, the suddenness of her death, and the romance that had in some way attached itself to her love for the young American, drew crowds to witness the funeral ceremonies which took place in the church in the Rue d'Aguesseau. The body was to be laid in M. Dorine's tomb, in the cemetery of Montmartre.

This tomb requires a few words of description. First there was a grating of filigraned iron; through this you looked into a small vestibule or hall, at the end of which was a massive door of oak opening upon a short flight of stone steps descending into the tomb. The vault was fifteen or twenty feet square, ingeniously ventilated from the ceiling, but unlighted. It contained two sarcophagi: the first held the remains of Madame Dorine, long since dead; the other was new, and bore on one side the letters J. D., in monogram, interwoven with fleurs-de-lis.

The funeral train stopped at the gate of the small garden that enclosed the place of burial, only the immediate relatives following the bearers into the tomb. A slender wax candle, such as is used in Catholic churches, burnt at the foot of the uncovered sarcophagus, casting a dim glow over the centre of the apartment, and deepening the shadows which seemed to huddle together in the corners. By this flickering light the coffin was placed in its granite shell, the heavy slab laid over it reverently, and the oaken door revolved on its rusty hinges, shutting out the uncertain ray of sunshine that had ventured to peep in on the darkness.

M. Dorine, muffled in his cloak, threw himself on the back seat of the carriage, too abstracted in his grief to observe that he was the only occupant of the vehicle. There was a sound of wheels grating on the gravelled avenue, and then all was silence again in the cemetery of Montmartre. At the main entrance the carriages parted company, dashing off into various streets at a pace that seemed to express a sense of relief. The band plays a dead march going to the grave, but Fra Diavolo coming from it.

It is not with the retreating carriages that our interest lies. Nor yet wholly with the dead in her mysterious dream; but with Philip Wentworth.

The rattle of wheels had died out of the air when Philip opened his eyes, bewildered, like a man abruptly roused from slumber. He raised himself on one arm and stared into the surrounding blackness. Where was he? In a second the truth flashed upon him. He had been left in the tomb! While kneeling on the farther side of the stone box, perhaps he had fainted, and in the last solemn rites his absence had been unnoticed.

His first emotion was one of natural terror. But this passed as quickly as it came. Life had ceased to be so very precious to him; and if it were his fate to die at Julie's side, was not that the fulfilment of the desire which he had expressed to himself a hundred times that morning? What did it matter, a few years sooner or later? He must lay down the burden at last. Why not then? A pang of self-reproach followed the thought. Could he so lightly throw aside the love that had bent over his cradle. The sacred name of mother rose involuntarily to his lips. Was it not cowardly to yield up without a struggle the life which he should guard for her sake? Was it not his duty to the living and the dead to face the difficulties of his position, and overcome them if it were within human power?

With an organization as delicate as a woman's, he had that spirit which, however sluggish in repose, can leap with a kind of exultation to measure its strength with disaster. The vague fear of the supernatural, that would affect most men in a similar situation, found no room in his heart. He was simply shut in a chamber from which it was necessary that he should obtain release within a given period. That this chamber contained the body of the woman he loved, so far from adding to the terror of the case, was a circumstance from which he drew consolation. She was a beautiful white statue now. Her soul was far hence; and if that pure spirit could return, would it not be to shield him with her love? It was impossible that the place should not engender some thought of the kind. He did not put the thought entirely from him as he rose to his feet and stretched out his hands in the darkness; but his mind was too healthy and practical to indulge long in such speculations.

Philip chanced to have in his pocket a box of wax-tapers which smokers use. After several ineffectual attempts, he succeeded in igniting one against the dank wall, and by its momentary glare perceived that the candle had been left in the tomb. This would serve him in examining the fastenings of the vault. If he could force the inner door by any means, and reach the grating, of which he had an indistinct recollection, he might hope to make himself heard. But the oaken door was immovable, as solid as the wall itself, into which it fitted air-tight. Even if he had had the requisite tools, there were no fastenings to be removed: the hinges were set on the outside.

Having ascertained this, he replaced the candle on the floor, and leaned against the wall thoughtfully, watching the blue fan of flame that wavered to and fro, threatening to detach itself from the wick. "At all events," he thought, "the place is ventilated." Suddenly Philip sprang forward and extinguished the light. His existence depended on that candle!

He had read somewhere, in some account of shipwreck, how the survivors had lived for days upon a few candles which one of the passengers had insanely thrown into the long-boat. And here he had been burning away his very life.

By the transient illumination of one of the tapers, he looked at his watch. It had stopped at eleven,—but at eleven that day, or the preceding night? The funeral, he knew, had left the church at ten. How many hours had passed since then? Of what duration had been his swoon? Alas! it was no longer possible for him to measure those hours which crawl like snails by the wretched, and fly like swallows over the happy.

He picked up the candle, and seated himself on the stone steps. He was a sanguine man, this Wentworth, but, as he weighed the chances of escape, the prospect did not seem encouraging. Of course he would be missed. His disappearance under the circumstances would surely alarm his friends; they would instigate a search for him; but who would think of searching for a live man in the cemetery of Montmartre? The Prefect of Police would set a hundred intelligences at work to find him; the Seine might be dragged, les miserables turned over at the dead-house; a minute description of him would be in every detective's pocket; and he—in M. Dorine's family tomb!

Yet, on the other hand, it was here he was last seen; from this point a keen detective would naturally work up the case. Then might not the undertaker return for the candlestick, probably not left by design? Or, again, might not M. Dorine send fresh wreaths of flowers, to take the place of those which now diffused a pungent, aromatic odor throughout the chamber? Ah! what unlikely chances! But if one of these things did not happen speedily, it had better never happen. How long could he keep life in himself?

With unaccelerated pulse, he quietly cut the half-burned candle into four equal parts. "To-night," he meditated, "I will eat the first of these pieces; to-morrow, the second; to-morrow evening, the third; the next day, the fourth; and then—then I'll wait!"

He had taken no breakfast that morning, unless a cup of coffee can be called a breakfast. He had never been very hungry before. He was ravenously hungry now. But he postponed the meal as long as practicable. It must have been near midnight, according to his calculation, when he determined to try the first of his four singular repasts. The bit of white-wax was tasteless; but it served its purpose.

His appetite for the time appeased, he found a new discomfort. The humidity of the walls, and the wind that crept through the unseen ventilator, chilled him to the bone. To keep walking was his only resource. A sort of drowsiness, too, occasionally came over him. It took all his will to fight it off. To sleep, he felt, was to die; and he had made up his mind to live.

Very strange fancies flitted through his head as he groped up and down the stone floor of the dungeon, feeling his way along the wall to avoid the sepulchres. Voices that had long been silent spoke words that had long been forgotten; faces he had known in childhood grew palpable against the dark. His whole life in detail was unrolled before him like a panorama; the changes of a year, with its burden of love and death, its sweets and its bitternesses, were epitomized in a single second. The desire to sleep had left him. But the keen hunger came again.

It must be near morning now, he mused; perhaps the sun is just gilding the pinnacles and domes of the city; or, may be, a dull, drizzling rain is beating on Paris, sobbing on these mounds above me. Paris! it seems like a dream. Did I ever walk in its gay streets in the golden air? O the delight and pain and passion of that sweet human life!

Philip became conscious that the gloom, the silence, and the cold were gradually conquering him. The feverish activity of his brain brought on a reaction. He grew lethargic, he sunk down on the steps, and thought of nothing. His hand fell by chance on one of the pieces of candle; he grasped it and devoured it mechanically. This revived him. "How strange," he thought, "that I am not thirsty. Is it possible that the dampness of the walls, which I must inhale with every breath, has supplied the need of water? Not a drop has passed my lips for two days, and still I experience no thirst. That drowsiness, thank Heaven, has gone. I think I was never wide awake until this hour. It would be an anodyne like poison that could weigh down my eyelids. No doubt the dread of sleep has something to do with this."

The minutes were like hours. Now he walked as briskly as he dared up and down the tomb; now he rested against the door. More than once he was tempted to throw himself upon the stone coffin that held Julie, and make no further struggle for his life.

Only one piece of candle remained. He had eaten the third portion, not to satisfy hunger, but from a precautionary motive. He had taken it as a man takes some disagreeable drug upon the result of which hangs safety. The time was rapidly approaching when even this poor substitute for nourishment would be exhausted. He delayed that moment. He gave himself a long fast this time. The half-inch of candle which he held in his hand was a sacred thing to him. It was his last defence against death.

At length, with such a sinking at heart as he had not known before, he raised it to his lips. Then he paused, then he hurled the fragment across the tomb, then the oaken door was flung open, and Philip, with dazzled eyes, saw M. Dorine's form sharply defined against the blue sky.

When they led him out, half blinded, into the broad daylight, M. Dorine noticed that Philip's hair, which a short time since was as black as a crow's wing, had actually turned gray in places. The man's eyes, too, had faded; the darkness had spoiled their lustre.

"And how long was he really confined in the tomb?" I asked, as Mr. H——concluded the story.

"Just one hour and twenty minutes!" replied Mr. H——, smiling blandly.

As he spoke, the little sloops, with their sails all blown out like white roses, came floating bravely into port, and Philip Wentworth lounged by us, wearily, in the pleasant April sunshine.

* * * * *

Mr. H——'s narrative made a deep impression on me. Here was a man who had undergone a strange ordeal. Here was a man whose sufferings were unique. His was no threadbare experience. Eighty minutes had seemed like two days to him! If he had really been immured two days in the tomb, the story, from my point of view, would have lost its tragic element.

After this it was but natural I should regard Mr. Wentworth with deepened interest. As I met him from day to day, passing through the Common with that same abstracted air, there was something in his loneliness which touched me. I wondered that I had not before read in his pale meditative face some such sad history as Mr. H—— had confided to me. I formed the resolution of speaking to him, though with what purpose was not very clear to my mind. One May morning we met at the intersection of two paths. He courteously halted to allow me the precedence.

"Mr. Wentworth," I began, "I—"

He interrupted me.

"My name, sir," he said, in an off-hand manner, "is Jones."

"Jo-Jo-Jones!" I gasped.

"Not Jo Jones," he returned coldly, "Frederick."

Mr. Jones, or whatever his name is, will never know, unless he reads these pages, why a man accosted him one morning as "Mr. Wentworth," and then abruptly rushed down the nearest path, and disappeared in the crowd.

The fact is, I had been duped by Mr. H——. Mr. H—— occasionally contributes a story to the magazines. He had actually tried the effect of one of his romances on me!

My hero, as I subsequently learned, is no hero at all, but a commonplace young man who has some connection with the building of that pretty granite bridge which will shortly span the crooked little lake in the Public Garden.

When I think of the cool ingenuity and readiness with which Mr. H——built up his airy fabric on my credulity, I am half inclined to laugh; though I feel not slightly irritated at having been the unresisting victim of his Black Art.



FREEDOM IN BRAZIL.

With clearer light, Cross of the South, shine forth In blue Brazilian skies; And thou, O river, cleaving half the earth From sunset to sunrise, From the great mountains to the Atlantic waves Thy joy's long anthem pour. Yet a few days (God make them less!) and slaves Shall shame thy pride no more. No fettered feet thy shaded margins press; But all men shall walk free Where thou, the high-priest of the wilderness, Hast wedded sea to sea.

And thou, great-hearted ruler, through whose mouth The word of God is said, Once more, "Let there be light!"—Son of the South, Lift up thy honored head, Wear unashamed a crown by thy desert More than by birth thy own, Careless of watch and ward; thou art begirt By grateful hearts alone. The moated wall and battle-ship may fail, But safe shall justice prove; Stronger than greaves of brass or iron mail The panoply of love.

Crowned doubly by man's blessing and God's grace, Thy future is secure; Who frees a people makes his statue's place In Time's Valhalla sure. Lo! from his Neva's banks the Scythian Czar Stretches to thee his hand Who, with the pencil of the Northern star, Wrote freedom on his land. And he whose grave is holy by our calm And prairied Sangamon, From his gaunt hand shall drop the martyr's palm To greet thee with "Well done!"

And thou, O Earth, with smiles thy face make sweet, And let thy wail be stilled, To hear the Muse of prophecy repeat Her promise half fulfilled. The Voice that spake at Nazareth speaks still, No sound thereof hath died; Alike thy hope and Heaven's eternal will Shall yet be satisfied. The years are slow, the vision tarrieth long, And far the end may be; But, one by one, the fiends of ancient wrong Go out and leave thee free.



MY VISIT TO SYBARIS.

It is a great while since I first took an interest in Sybaris. Sybarites have a bad name. But before I had heard of them anywhere else, I had painfully looked out the words in the three or four precious anecdotes about Sybaris in the old Greek Reader; and I had made up my boy's mind about the Sybarites. When I came to know the name they had got elsewhere, I could not but say that the world had been very unjust to them!

O dear! I can see it now,—the old Latin school-room, where we used to sit, and hammer over that Greek, after the small boys had gone. They went at eleven; we—because we were twelve years old—stayed till twelve. From eleven to twelve we sat, with only those small boys who had been "kept" for their sins, and Mr. Dillaway. The room was long and narrow; how long and how narrow, you may see, if you will go and examine M. Duchesne's model of "Boston as it was," and pay twenty-five cents to the Richmond schools. For all this is of the past; and in the same spot in space where once a month the Examiner Club now meets at Parker's, and discusses the difference between religion and superstition, the folly of copyright, and the origin of things, the boys who did not then belong to the Examiner Club, say Fox and Clarke and Furness and Waldo Emerson, thumbed their Greek Readers in "Boston as it was," and learned the truth about Sybaris! A long, narrow room, I say, whose walls, when I knew them first, were of that tawny orange wash which is appropriated to kitchens. But by a master stroke of Mr. Dillaway's these walls were made lilac or purple one summer vacation. We sat, to recite, on long settees, pea-green in color, which would teeter slightly on the well-worn floor. There, for an hour daily, while brighter boys than I recited, I sat an hour musing, looking at the immense Jacobs's Greek Reader, and waiting my turn to come. If you did not look off your book much, no harm came to you. So, in the hour, you got fifty-three minutes and a few odd seconds of day-dream, for six minutes and two thirds of reciting, unless, which was unusual, some fellow above you broke down, and a question passed along of a sudden recalled you to modern life. I have been sitting on that old green settee, and at the same time riding on horseback in Virginia, through an open wooded country, with one of Lord Fairfax's grandsons and two pretty cousins of his, and a fallow deer has just appeared in the distance, when, by the failure of Hutchinson or Wheeler, just above me, poor Mr. Dillaway has had to ask me, "Ingham, what verbs omit the reduplication?" Talk of war! Where is versatility, otherwise called presence of mind, so needed as in recitation at a public school?

Well, there, I say, I made acquaintance with Sybaris. Nay, strictly speaking, my first visits to Sybaris were made there and then. What the Greek Reader tells of Sybaris is in three or four anecdotes, woven into that strange, incoherent patchwork of "Geography." In that place are patched together a statement of Strabo and one of Athenaeus about two things in Sybaris which may have belonged some eight hundred years apart. But what of that to a school-boy! Will your descendants, dear reader, in the year 3579 A. D., be much troubled, if, in the English Reader of their day, Queen Victoria shall be made to drink Spartan black broth with William the Conqueror out of a conch-shell in New Zealand?

With regard to Sybaris, then, the old Jacobs's Greek Reader tells the following stories: "The Sybarites were distinguished for luxury. They did not permit the trades which made a loud noise, such as those of brass-workers, carpenters, and the like, to be carried on in the heart of the city, so that their sleep might be wholly undisturbed by noise.... And a Sybarite who had gone to Lacedaemon, and had been invited to the public meal, after he had sat on their wooden benches and partaken of their fare, said that he had been astonished at the fearlessness of the Lacedaemonians when he knew it only by report; but now that he had seen them, he thought that they did not excel other men, for he thought that any brave man had much rather die than be obliged to live such a life as they did." Then there is another story, among the "miscellaneous anecdotes," of a Sybarite who was asked if he had slept well. He said, No, that he believed he had a crumpled rose-leaf under him in the night. And there is yet another, of one of them who said that it made his back ache to see another man digging.

I have asked Polly, as I write, to look in Mark Lemon's Jest-Book for these stories. They are not in the index there. But I dare say they are in Cotton Mather and Jeremy Taylor. Any way, they are bits of very cheap Greek. Now it is on these stories that the reputation of the Sybarites in modern times appears to depend.

Now look at them. This Sybarite at Sparta said, that in war death was often easier than the hardships of life. Well, is not that true? Have not thousands of brave men said it? When the English and French got themselves established on the wrong side of Sebastopol, what did that engineer officer of the French say to somebody who came to inspect his works? He was talking of St. Arnaud, their first commander. "Cunning dog," said he, "he went and died." Death was easier than life. But nobody ever said he was a coward or effeminate because he said this. Why, if Mr. Fields would permit an excursus in twelve numbers here, on this theme, we would defer Sybaris to the 1st of April, 1868, while we illustrated the Sybarite's manly epigram, which these stupid Spartans could only gape at, but could not understand.

Then take the rose-leaf story. Suppose by good luck you were breakfasting with General Grant, or Pelissier, or the Duke of Wellington. Suppose you said, "I hope you slept well," and the great soldier said, "No, I did not; I think a rose-leaf must have stood up edgewise under me." Would you go off and say in your book of travels that the Americans, or the French, or the English are all effeminate pleasure-seekers, because one of them made this nice little joke? Would you like to have the name "American" go down to all time, defined as Webster[B] defines Sybarite?

A-MĔR'I-CAN, n. [Fr. Americain, Lat. Americanus, from Lat. America, a continent noted for the effeminacy and voluptuousness of its inhabitants.] A person devoted to luxury and pleasure.

Should you think that was quite fair for your great-grandson's grandson's descendant in the twenty-seventh remove to read, who is going to be instructed about Queen Victoria and William the Conqueror?

Worst of all, and most frequently quoted, is the story of the coppersmiths. The Sybarites, it is said, ordered that the coppersmiths and brass-founders should all reside in one part of the city, and bang their respective metals where the neighbors had voluntarily chosen to listen to banging. What if they did? Does not every manufacturing city practically do the same thing? What did Nicholas Tillinghast use to say to the boys and girls at Bridgewater? "The tendency of cities is to resolve themselves into order."

Is not Wall Street at this hour a street of bankers? Is not the Boston Pearl Street a street of leather men? Is not the bridge at Florence given over to jewellers? Was not my valise, there, bought in Rome at the street of trunk-makers? Do not all booksellers like to huddle together as long as they can? And when Ticknor and Fields move a few inches from Washington Street to Tremont Street, do not Russell and Bates, and Childs and Jenks, and De Vries and Ibarra, follow them as soon as the shops can be got ready?

"But it is the motive," pipes up the old gray ghost of propriety, who started this abuse of the Sybarites in some stupid Spartan black-broth shop (English that for cafe), two thousand two hundred and twenty-two years ago,—which ghost I am now belaboring,—"it is the motive. The Sybarites moved the brass-founders, because they wanted to sleep after the brass-founders got up in the morning." What if they did, you old rat in the arras? Is there any law, human or divine, which says that at one and the same hour all men shall rise from bed in this world? My excellent milkman, Mr. Whit, rises from bed daily at two o'clock. If he does not, my family, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, will not have their fresh milk at 7.37, at which time we breakfast or pretend to. But because he rises at two, must we all rise at two, and sit wretchedly whining on our respective camp-stools, waiting for Mr. Whit to arrive with the grateful beverage? Many is the time, when I have been watching with a sick child at five in a summer morning, when the little fellow had just dropped into a grateful morning doze, that I have listened and waited, dreading the arrival of the Providence morning express. Because I knew that, a mile and a half out of Boston, the engine would begin to blow its shrill whistle, for the purpose, I believe, of calling the Boston station-men to their duty. Three or four minutes of that skre-e-e-e must there be, as that train swept by our end of the town. And hoping and wishing never did any good; the train would come, and the child would wake. Is not that a magnificent power for one engine-man to have over the morning rest of thirty thousand sleeping people, because you, old Spartan croaker, who can't sleep easy underground it seems, want to have everybody waked up at the same hour in the morning. When I hear that whistle, and the fifty other whistles of the factories that have since followed its wayward and unlicensed example, I have wished more than once that we had in Boston a little more of the firm government of Sybaris.

For if, as it would appear from these instances, Sybaris were a city which grew to wealth and strength by the recognition of the personal rights of each individual in the state,—if Sybaris were a republic, where the individual was respected, had his rights, and was not left to the average chances of the majority of men,—then Sybaris had found out something which no modern city has found out, and which it is a pity we have all forgotten.

I do not say that I went through all this speculation at the Latin school. I got no further there than to see that the Sybarites had got a very bad name, and that the causes did not appear in the Greek Reader. I supposed there were causes somewhere, which it was not proper to put into the Greek Reader. Perhaps there were. But if there were, I have never found them,—not being indeed very well acquainted with the lines of reading in which those who wanted to find them should look for them.

* * * * *

What I did find of Sybaris, when I could read Greek rather more easily, and could get access to some decent atlases, was briefly this.

Well forward in the hollow of the arched foot of the boot of Italy, two little rivers run into the Gulf of Tarentum. One was named Crathis, one was named Sybaris. Here stood the ancient city of Sybaris, founded, about the time of Romulus or Numa Pompilius, by a colony from Greece. For two hundred years and more,—almost as long, dear Atlantic, as your beloved Boston has subsisted,—Sybaris flourished, and was the Rome of that region, ruling it from sea to sea.

It was the capital of four states,—a sort of New England, if you will observe,—and could send three hundred thousand armed men into the field. The walls of the city were six miles in circumference, while the suburbs covered the banks of the Crathis for a space of seven miles. At last the neighboring state of Crotona, under the lead of Milon the Athlete (he of the calf and ox and split log), the Heenan or John Morrissey of his day, vanquished the more refined Sybarites, turned the waters of the Crathis upon their prosperous city, and destroyed it. But the Sybarites had had that thing happen too often to be discouraged. Five times, say the historians, had Sybaris been destroyed, and five times they built it up again. This time the Athenians sent ten vessels, with men to help them, under Lampon and Xenocritus. And they, with those who stood by the wreck, gave their new city the name of Thurii. Among the new colonists were Herodotus, and Lysias the orator, who was then a boy. The spirit that had given Sybaris its comfort and its immense population appeared in the legislation of the new state. It received its laws from CHARONDAS, one of the noblest legislators of the world. Study these laws and you will see that in the young Sybaris the individual had his rights, which the public preserved for him, though he were wholly in a minority. There is an evident determination that a man shall live while he lives, and that, too, in no sensual interpretation of the words.

Of the laws made by Charondas for the new Sybaris a few are preserved.

1. A calumniator was marched round the city in disgrace, crowned with tamarisk. "In consequence," says the Scholiast, "they all left the city." O for such a result, from whatever legislation, in our modern Pedlingtons, great or little!

2. All persons were forbidden to associate with the bad.

3. "He made another law, better than these, and neglected by the older legislators. For he enacted that all the sons of the citizens should be instructed in letters, the city paying the salaries of the teachers. For he held that the poor, not being able to pay their teachers from their own property, would be deprived of the most valuable discipline." There is FREE EDUCATION for you, two thousand and seventy-six years before the date of your first Massachusetts free school; and the theory of free education completely stated.

4. Deserters or cowards in battle had to sit in women's dresses in the Forum three days.

5. With regard to the amendment of laws, any man or woman who moved one did it with a noose round his neck, and was hanged if the people refused it. Only three laws were ever amended, therefore, all which are recorded in the history. Observe that the women might move amendments,—and think of the simplicity of legislation!

6. The law provided for cash payments, and the government gave no protection for those who sold on credit.

7. Their communication with other nations was perfectly free.

I might give more instances. I should like to tell some of the curious stories which illustrate this simple legislation. Poor Charondas himself fell a victim to it. One of the laws provided that no man should wear a sword into the public assembly. No Cromwells there! Unfortunately, by accident, Charondas wore his own there one day. Brave fellow! when the fault was pointed out, he killed himself with it.

Now do you wonder that a city where there were no calumniators, no long credit, no bills at the grocers, no fighting at town meetings, no amendments to the laws, no intentional and open association with profligates, and where everybody was educated by the state to letters, proved a comfortable place to live in? It is of the old Sybaris that the coppersmith and the rose-leaf stories are told; and it was the new Sybaris that made the laws. But do you not see that there is one spirit in the whole? Here was a nation which believed that the highest work of a nation was to train its people. It did not believe in fight, like Milon or Heenan or the old Spartans; it did not believe in legislation, like Massachusetts and New York; it did not believe in commerce, like Carthage and England. It believed in men and women. It respected men and women. It educated men and women. It gave their rights to men and women. And so the Spartans called them effeminate. And the Greek Reader made fun of them. But perhaps the people who lived there were indifferent to the opinions of the Spartans and of the Greek Reader. Herodotus lived there till he died; wrote his history there, among other things. Lysias, the orator, took part in the administration. It is not from them, you may be sure, that you get the anecdotes which ridicule the old city of Sybaris!

You and I would probably be satisfied with such company as that of Herodotus and Charondas and Lysias. So we hunt the history down to see if there may be lodgings to let there this summer, but only to find that it all pales out in the ignorance of our modern days. The name gets changed into Lupiae; but there it turns out that Pausanias made "a strange mistake," and should have written Copia,—which was perhaps Cossa, or sometimes Cosa. Pyrrhus appears, and Hadrian rebuilds something, and the "Oltramontani," whoever they may have been, ravage it, and finally the Saracens fire and sack it; and so, in the latest Italian itinerary you can find, there is no post-road goes near it, only a strada rotabile (wheel-track) upon the hills; and, alas! even the rotabile gives way at last, and all the map will own to is a strada pedonale, or foot-path. But the map is of the less consequence, when you find that the man who edited it had no later dates than the beginning of the last century, when the family of Serra had transferred the title to Sybaris to a Genoese family without a name, who received from it forty thousand ducats yearly, and would have received more, if their agents had been more faithful. There the place fades out of history, and you find in your Swinburne, "that the locality has never been thoroughly examined"; in your Smith's Dictionary, that "the whole subject is very obscure, and a careful examination still much needed"; in the Cyclopaedia, that the site of Sybaris is lost. Craven saw the rivers Crathis and Sybaris. He seems not to have seen the wall of Sybaris, which he supposed to be under water. He does say of Cassano, the nearest town he came to, that "no other spot can boast of such advantages." In short, no man living who has written any book about it dares say that anybody has looked upon the certain site of Sybaris for more than a hundred years.[C] If a man wanted to write a mythical story, where could he find a better scene?

Now is not this a very remarkable thing? Here was a city, which, under its two names of Sybaris or of Thurium, was for centuries the regnant city of all that part of the world. It could call into the field three hundred thousand men,—an army enough larger than Athens ever furnished, or Sparta. It was a far more populous and powerful state than ever Athens was, or Sparta, or the whole of Hellas. It invented and carried into effect free popular education,—a gift to the administration of free government larger than ever Rome rendered. It received and honored Charondas, the great practical legislator, from whose laws no man shall say how much has trickled down into the Code Napoleon or the Revised Statutes of New York, through the humble studies of the Roman jurists. It maintained in peace, prosperity, happiness, and, as its maligners say, in comfort, an immense population. If they had not been as comfortable as they were,—if a tenth part of them had received alms every year, and a tenth part were flogged in the public schools every year,—if one in forty had been sent to prison every year, as in the happy city which publishes the "Atlantic Monthly,"—then Sybaris, perhaps, would never have got its bad name for luxury. Such a city lived, flourished, ruled, for hundreds of years. Of such a city all that you know now with certainty is, that its coin is "the most beautifully finished in the cabinets of ancient coinage"; and that no traveller even pretends to be sure that he has been to the site of it for more than a hundred years. That speaks well for your nineteenth century.

Now the reader who has come thus far will understand that I, having come thus far, in twenty-odd years since those days of teetering on the pea-green settee, had always kept Sybaris in the background of my head, as a problem to be solved, and an inquiry to be followed to its completion. There could hardly have been a man in the world better satisfied than I to be the hero of the adventure which I am now about to describe.

* * * * *

If the reader remembers anything about Garibaldi's triumphal entry into Porto Cavallo in Sicily in the spring of 1859, he will remember that, between the months of March and April in that year, the great chieftain made, in that wretched little fishing haven, a long pause, which was not at the time understood by the journals or by their military critics, and which, indeed, to this hour has never been publicly explained. I suppose I know as much about it as any man now living. But I am not writing Garibaldi's memoirs, nor, indeed, my own, excepting so far as they relate to Sybaris; and it is strictly nobody's business to inquire as to that detention, unless it interest the ex-king of Naples, who may write to me, if he chooses, addressing Frederic Ingham, Esq., Waterville, N. H. Nor is it anybody's business how long I had then been on Garibaldi's staff. From the number of his staff-officers who have since visited me in America, very much in want of a pair of pantaloons, or a ticket to New York, or something with which they might buy a glass of whiskey, I should think that his staff alone must have made up a much more considerable army than Naples, or even Sybaris, ever brought into the field. But where these men were when I was with him, I do not know. I only know that there was but a handful of us then, hard-worked fellows, good-natured, and not above our work. Of its military details we knew wretchedly little. But as we had no artillery, ignorance was less dangerous in the chief of artillery; as we had no maps to draw, poor draughtsmanship did not much embarrass the engineer in chief. For me, I was nothing but an aid, and I was glad to do anything that fell to me as well as I knew how. And, as usual in human life, I found that a cool head, a steady resolve, a concentrated purpose, and an unselfish readiness to obey, carried me a great way. I listened instead of talking, and thus got a reputation for knowing a great deal. When the time to act came, I acted without waiting for the wave to recede; and thus I sprang into many a boat dry-shod, while people who believed in what is popularly called prudence missed their chance, and either lost the boat or fell into the water.

This is by the way. It was under these circumstances that I received my orders, wholly secret and unexpected, to take a boat at once, pass the straits, and cross the Bay of Tarentum, to communicate at Gallipoli with—no matter whom. Perhaps I was going to the "Castle of Otranto." A hundred years hence anybody who chooses will know. Meanwhile, if there should be a reaction in Otranto, I do not choose to shorten anybody's neck for him.

Well, it was five in the afternoon,—near sundown at that season. I went to dear old Frank Chaney,—the jolliest of jolly Englishmen, who was acting quartermaster-general,—and told him I must have transportation. I can see him and hear him now,—as he sat on his barrel head, smoked his vile Tunisian tobacco in his beloved short meerschaum, which was left to him ever since he was at Bonn, as he pretended, a student with Prince Albert. He did not swear,—I don't think he ever did. But he looked perplexed enough to swear. And very droll was the twinkle of his eye. The truth was, that every sort of a thing that would sail, and every wretch of a fisherman that could sail her, had been, as he knew, and as I knew, sent off that very morning to rendezvous at Carrara, for the contingent which we were hoping had slipped through Cavour's pretended neutrality. And here was an order for him to furnish me "transportation" in exactly the opposite direction.

"Do you know of anything, yourself, Fred?" said he.

"Not a coffin," said I.

"Did the chief suggest anything?"

"Not a nutshell," said I.

"Could not you go by telegraph?" said Frank, pointing up to the dumb old semaphore in whose tower he had established himself. "Or has not the chief got a wishing carpet? Or can't you ride to Gallipoli? Here are some excellent white-tailed mules, good enough for Pindar, whom Colvocoressis has just brought in from the monastery. 'Transportation for one!' Is there anything to be brought back? Nitre, powder, lead, junk, hard-tack, mules, horses, pigs, polenta, or olla podrida, or other of the stores of war?"

No; there was nothing to bring back except myself. Lucky enough if I came back to tell my own story. And so we walked up on the tower deck to take a look.

Blessed St. Lazarus, chief of Naples and of beggars! a little felucca was just rounding the Horse Head and coming into the bay, wing-wing. The fishermen in her had no thought that they were ever going to get into the Atlantic. May be they had never heard of the Ocean or of the Monthly. Can that be possible? Frank nodded, and I. He filled up with more Tunisian, beckoned to an orderly, and we walked down to the landing-jetty to meet them.

"Viva Italia!" shouted Frank, as they drew near enough to hear.

"Viva Garibaldi!" cried the skipper, as he let his sheet fly and rounded to the well-worn stones. A good voyage had they made of it, he and his two brown, ragged boys. Large fish and small, pink fish, blue, yellow, orange, striped fish and mottled, wriggled together, and flapped their tails in the well of the little boat. There were even too many to lie there and wriggle. The bottom of the boat was well covered with them, and, if she had not shipped waves enough to keep them cool, the boy Battista had bailed a plenty on them. Father and son hurried on shore, and Battista on board began to fling the scaly fellows out to them.

A very small craft it was to double all those capes in, run the straits, and stretch across the bay. If it had been mine "to make reply," I should undoubtedly have made this, that I would see the quartermaster hanged, and his superiors, before I risked myself in any such rattletrap. But as, unfortunately, it was mine to go where I was sent, I merely set the orderly to throwing out fish with the boys, and began to talk with the father.

Queer enough, just at that moment, there came over me the feeling that, as a graduate of the University, it was my duty to put up those red, white, and blue scaly fellows, who were flopping about there so briskly, and send them in alcohol to Agassiz. But there are so many duties of that kind which one neglects in a hard-worked world! As a graduate, it is my duty to send annually to the College Librarian a list of all the graduates who have died in the town I live in, with their fathers' and mothers' names, and the motives that led them to College, with anecdotes of their career, and the date of their death. There are two thousand three hundred and forty-five of them I believe, and I have never sent one half-anecdote about one! Such failure in duty made me grimly smile as I omitted to stop and put up these fish in alcohol, and as I plied the unconscious skipper with inquiries about his boat. "Had she ever been outside?" "O signor, she had been outside this very day. You cannot catch tonno till you have passed both capes,—least of all such fine fish as that is,"—and he kicked the poor wretch. Can it be true, as C—— says, that those dying flaps of theirs, are exquisite luxury to them, because for the first time they have their fill of oxygen? "Had he ever been beyond Peloro?" "O yes, signor; my wife, Caterina, was herself from Messina,"—and on great saints' days they had gone there often. Poor fellow, his great saint's day sealed his fate. I nodded to Frank,—Frank nodded to me,—and Frank blandly informed him that, by order of General Garibaldi, he would take the gentleman at once on board, pass the strait with him, "and then go where he tells you."

The Southern Italian has the reputation, derived from Tom Moore, of being a coward. When I used to speak at school,

"Ay, down to the dust with them,—slaves as they are!"—

stamping my foot at "dust," I certainly thought they were a very mean crew. But I dare say that Neapolitan school-boys have some similar school piece about the risings of Tom Moore's countrymen, which certainly have not been much more successful than the poor little Neapolitan revolution which he was pleased to satirize. Somehow or other, Victor Emanuel is, at this hour, king of Naples. Coward or not, this fine fellow of a fisherman did not flinch. It is my private opinion that he was not nearly as much afraid of the enterprise as I was. I made this observation at the moment with some satisfaction, sent Frank's man up to my lodgings with a note ordering my own traps sent down, and in an hour we were stretching out, under the twilight, across the little bay.

No! I spare you the voyage. Sybaris is what we are after, all this time, if we can only get there. Very easy it would be for me to give you cheap scholarship from the AEneid, about Palinurus and Scylla and Charybdis. Neither Scylla nor Charybdis bothered me,—as we passed wing-wing between them before a smart north wind. I had a little Hunter's Virgil with me, and read the whole voyage,—and confused Battista utterly by trying to make him remember something about Palinuro, of whom he had never heard. It was much as I afterwards asked my negro waiter at Fort Monroe about General Washington at Yorktown. "Never heard of him, sir,—was he in the Regular army?" So Battista thought Palinuro must have fished in the Italian fleet, with which the Sicilian boatmen were not well acquainted. Messina made no objections to us. Perhaps, if the sloop of war which lay there had known who was lying in the boat under her guns, I might not be writing these words to-day. Battista went ashore, got lemons, macaroni, hard bread, polenta, for themselves, the Giornale di Messina for me, and more Tunisian; and, not to lose that splendid breeze, we cracked on all day, passed Reggio, hugged the shore bravely, though it was rough, ran close under those cliffs which are the very end of the Apennines,—will it shock the modest reader if I say the very toe-nails of the Italian foot?—hauled more and more eastward, made Spartivento blue in the distance, made it purple, made it brown, made it green, still running admirably,—ten knots an hour we must have got between four and five that afternoon,—and by the time the lighthouse at Spartivento was well ablaze we were abreast of it, and might begin to haul more northward, so that, though we had a long course before us, we should at last be sailing almost directly towards our voyage's end, Gallipoli.

At that moment—as in any sea often happens, if you come out from the more land-locked channel into the larger body of water—the wind appeared to change. Really, I suppose, we came into the steady southwest wind which had probably been drawing all day up toward the Adriatic. In two hours more we made the lighthouse of Stilo, and I was then tired enough to crawl down into the fearfully smelling little cuddy, and, wrapping Battista's heavy storm-jacket round my feet, I caught some sort of sleep.

But not for very long. I struck my watch at three in the morning. And the air was so unworthy of that name,—it was such a thick paste, seeming to me more like a mixture of tar and oil and fresh fish and decayed fish and bilge-water than air itself,—that I voted three morning, and crawled up into the clear starlight,—how wonderful it was, and the fresh wet breeze that washed my face so cheerily!—and I bade Battista take his turn below, while I would lie there and mind the helm. If—if he had done what I proposed, I suppose I should not be writing these lines; but his father, good fellow, said: "No, signor, not yet. We leave the shore now for the broad bay, you see; and if the wind haul southward, we may need to go on the other tack. We will all stay here, till we see what the deep-sea wind may be." So we lay there, humming, singing, and telling stories, still this rampant southwest wind behind, as if all the powers of the Mediterranean meant to favor my mission to Gallipoli. The boat was now running straight before it. We stretched out bravely into the gulf; but, before the wind, it was astonishing how easily the lugger ran. He said to me at last, however, that on that course we were running to leeward of our object; but that it was the best point for his boat, and if the wind held, he would keep on so an hour longer, and trust to the land breeze in the morning to run down the opposite shore of the bay.

"If" again. The wind did not keep on. Either the pole-star, and the dipper, and all the rest of them, had rebelled and were drifting westward,—and so it seemed; or this steady southwest gale was giving out; or, as I said before, we had come into the sweep of a current even stronger, pouring from the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean full up the Gulf of Tarentum. Not ten minutes after the skipper spoke, it was clear enough to both of us that the boat must go about, whether we wanted to or not, and we waked the other boy, to send him forward, before we accepted the necessity. Half asleep, he got up, courteously declined my effort to help him by me as he crossed the boat, stepped round on the gunwale behind me as I sat, and then, either in a lurch or in some misstep, caught his foot in the tiller as his father held it firm, and pitched down directly behind Battista himself, and, as I thought, into the sea. I sprang to leeward to throw something after him, and found him in the sea indeed, but hanging by both hands to the gunwale, safe enough, and in a minute, with Battista's help and mine, on board again. I remember how pleased I was that his father did not swear at him, but only laughed prettily, and bade him be quick, and step forward; and then, turning to the helm, which he had left free for the moment, he did not swear indeed, but he did cry "Santa Madre!" when he found there was no tiller there. The boy's foot had fairly wrenched it, not only from his father's hand, but from the rudder-head,—and it was gone!

We held the old fellow firmly by his feet and legs, as he lay over the stern of the boat, head down, examining the condition of the rudder-head. The report was not favorable. I renewed the investigation myself in the same uncomfortable attitude. The phosphorescence of the sea was but an unsteady light, but light enough there was to reveal what daylight made hardly more certain,—that the wrench which had been given to the rotten old fixtures, shaky enough at best, had split the head of the rudder, so that the pintle hung but loosely in its bed, and that there was nothing available for us to rig a jury-tiller on. This discovery, as it became more and more clear to each of us four in succession, abated successively the volleys of advice which we were offering, and sent us back to our more quiet "Santa Madres" or to meditations on "what was next to best."

Meanwhile the boat was flying, under the sail she had before, straight before the wind, up the Gulf of Tarentum.

If you cannot have what you like, it is best, in a finite world, to like what you have. And while the old man brought up from the cuddy his wretched and worthless stock of staves, rope-ends, and bits of iron, and contemplated them ruefully, as if asking them which would like to assume the shape of a rudder-head and tiller, if his fairy godmother would appear on the top of the mast for a moment, I was plying the boys with questions,—what would happen to us if we held on at this tearing rate, and rushed up the bay to the head thereof. The boys knew no more than they knew of Palinuro. Far enough, indeed, were we from their parish. The old man at last laid down the bit of brass which he had saved from some old waif, and listened to me as I pointed out to them on my map the course we were making, and, without answering me a word, fell on his knees and broke into most voluble prayer,—only interrupted by sobs of undisguised agony. The boys were almost as much surprised as I was. And as he prayed and sobbed, the boat rushed on!

Santa Madre, San Giovanni, and Sant' Antonio,—we needed all their help, if it were only to keep him quiet; and when at last he rose from his knees, and came to himself enough to tend the sheets a little, I asked, as modestly as I could, what put this keen edge on his grief or his devotions. Then came such stories of hobgoblins, witches, devils, giants, elves, and fairies, at this head of the bay!—no man ever returned who landed there; his father and his father's father had charged him, and his brothers and his cousins, never to be lured to make a voyage there, and never to run for those coves, though schools of golden fish should lead the way. It was not till this moment, that, trying to make him look upon the map, I read myself there the words, at the mouth of the Crathis River, "Sybaris Ruine."

Surely enough, this howling Euroclydon—for Euroclydon it now was—was bearing me and mine directly to Sybaris!

And here was this devout old fisherman confirming the words of Smith's Dictionary, when it said that nobody had been there and returned, for generation upon generation.

At a dozen knots an hour, as things were, I was going to Sybaris! Nor was I many hours from it. For at that moment we cannot have been more than five-and-thirty miles from the beach, where, in less than four hours, Euroclydon flung us on shore.

The memory of the old green settees, and of Hutchinson and Wheeler and the other Latin-school boys, sustained me beneath the calamity which impended. Nor do I think at heart the boys felt so bad as their father about the djins and the devils, the powers of the earth and the powers of the air. Is there, perhaps, in the youthful mind, rather a passion for "seeing the folly" of life a little in that direction? None the less did we join him in rigging out the longest sweep we had aft, lashing it tight under the little rail which we had been leaning on, and trying gentle experiments, how far this extemporized rudder might bring the boat round to the wind. Nonsense the whole. By that time Euroclydon was on us, so that I would never have tried to put her about if we had had the best gear I ever handled, and our experiments only succeeded far enough to show that we were as utterly powerless as men could be. Meanwhile day was just beginning to break. I soothed the old man with such devout expressions as heretic might venture. I tried to turn him from the coming evil to the present necessity. I counselled with him whether it might not be safer to take in sail and drift along. But from this he dissented. Time enough to take in sail when we knew what shore we were coming to. He had no kedge or grapple or cord, indeed, that would pretend to hold this boat against this gale. We would beach her, if it pleased the Virgin; and if we could not,—shaking his head,—why, that would please the Virgin, too.

And so Euroclydon hurried us on to Sybaris.

The sun rose, O how magnificently! Is there anywhere to see sunrise like the Mediterranean? And if one may not be on the top of Katahdin, is there any place for sunrise like the very level of the sea? Already the Calabrian mountains of our western horizon were gray against the sky. One or another of us was forward all the time, trying to make out by what slopes the hills descended to the sea. Was it cliff of basalt, or was it reedy swamp, that was to receive us. I insisted at last on his reducing sail. For I felt sure that he was driving on under a sort of fatality which made him dare the worst. I was wholly right, for the boat now rose easier on the water, and was much more dry.

Perhaps the wind flagged a little as the sun rose. At all events, he took courage, which I had never lost. I made his boy find us some oranges. I made them laugh by eating their cold polenta with them. I even made him confess, when I called him aft and sent Battista forward, that the shore we were nearing looked low. For we were near enough now to see stone pines and chestnut-trees. Did anybody see the towers of Sybaris?

Not a tower! But, on the other hand, not a gnome, witch, Norna's Head, or other intimation of the underworld. The shore looked like many other Italian shores. It looked not very unlike what we Yankees call salt-marsh. At all events, we should not break our heads against a wall! Nor will I draw out the story of our anxieties, varying as the waves did on which we rose and fell so easily. As she forged on, it was clear at last that to some wanderers, at least, Sybaris had some hospitality. A long, low spit made out into the sea, with never a house on it, but brown with storm-worn shrubs, above the line of which were the stone-pines and chestnuts which had first given character to the shore. Hard for us, if we had been flung on the outside of this spit. But we were not. Else I had not been writing here to-day. We passed it by fifty fathom clear. Of course under its lee was our harbor. Battista let go the halyards in a moment, and the wet sails came rattling down. The old man, the boy, Battista, and I seized the best sweeps he had left. Two of us at each, working on the same side, we brought her head round as fast as she would bear it in that fearful sea. Inch by inch we wrought along to the smoother water, and breathed free at last, as we came under the partial protection of the friendly shore.

Battista and his brother then hauled up the sail enough to give such headway to the boat as we thought our sweeps would control. And we crept along the shore for an hour, seeing nothing but reeds, and now and then a distant buffalo, when at last a very hard knock on a rock the boy ahead had not seen under water started the planks so that we knew that was dangerous play; and, without more solicitation, the old man beached the boat in a little cove where the reeds gave place for a trickling stream. I told them they might land or not, as they pleased. I would go ashore and get assistance or information. The old man clearly thought I was going to ask my assistance from the father of lies himself. But he was resigned to my will,—said he would wait for my return. I stripped, and waded ashore with my clothes upon my head, dressed as quickly as I could, and pushed up from the beach to the low upland.

Clearly enough I was in a civilized country. Not that there was a gallows, as the old joke says; but there were tracks in the shingle of the beach showing where wheels had been, and these led me to a cart-track between high growths of that Mediterranean reed which grows all along in those low flats. There is one of the reeds on the hooks above my gun in the hall as you came in. I followed up the track, but without seeing barn, house, horse, or man, for a quarter of a mile, perhaps, when behold,—

Not the footprint of a man! as to Robinson Crusoe;—

Not a gallows and man hanging! as in the sailor story above named;—

But a railroad track! Evidently a horse-railroad.

"A horse-railroad in Italy!" said I, aloud. "A horse-railroad in Sybaris! It must have changed since the days of the coppersmiths!" And I flung myself on a heap of reeds which lay there, and waited.

In two minutes I heard the fast step of horses, as I supposed; in a minute more four mules rounded the corner, and a "horse-car" came dashing along the road. I stepped forward and waved my hand, but the driver bowed respectfully, pointed back, and then to a board on top of his car, and I read, as he dashed by me, the word

[Greek: Pleron],

displayed full above him; as one may read Complet on a Paris omnibus.

Now [Greek: Pleron] is the Greek for full. "In Sybaris they do not let the horse-railroads grind the faces of the passengers," said I. "Not so wholly changed since the coppersmiths." And, within the minute, more quadrupedantal noises, more mules, and another car, which stopped at my signal. I entered, and found a dozen or more passengers, sitting back to back on a seat which ran up the middle of the car, as you might ride in an Irish jaunting-car. In this way it was impossible for the conductor to smuggle in a standing passenger, impossible for a passenger to catch cold from a cracked window, and possible for a passenger to see the scenery from the window. "Can it be possible," said I, "that the traditions of Sybaris really linger here?"

I sat quite in the front of the car, so that I could see the fate of my first friend [Greek: Pleron],—the full car. In a very few minutes it switched off from our track, leaving us still to pick up our complement, and then I saw that it dropped its mules, and was attached, on a side track, to an endless chain, which took it along at a much greater rapidity, so that it was soon out of sight. I addressed my next neighbor on the subject, in Greek which would have made my fortune in those old days of the pea-green settees. But he did not seem to make much of that, but in sufficiently good Italian told me, that, as soon as we were full, we should be attached in the same way to the chain, which was driven by stationary engines five or six stadia apart, and so indeed it proved. We picked up one or two market-women, a young artist or two, and a little boy. When the child got in, there was a nod and smile on people's faces; my next neighbor said to me, [Greek: Pleron], as if with an air of relief; and sure enough, in a minute more, we were flying along at a 2.20 pace, with neither mule nor engine in sight, stopping about once a mile to drop passengers, if there was need, and evidently approaching Sybaris.

All along now were houses, each with its pretty garden of perhaps an acre, no fences, because no cattle at large. I wonder if the Vineland people know they caught that idea from Sybaris! All the houses were of one story,—stretching out as you remember Pliny's villa did, if Ware and Van Brunt ever showed you the plans,—or as Erastus Bigelow builds factories at Clinton. I learned afterwards that stair-builders and slaveholders are forbidden to live in Sybaris by the same article in the fundamental law. This accounts, with other things, for the vigorous health of their women. I supposed that this was a mere suburban habit, and, though the houses came nearer and nearer, yet, as no two houses touched in a block, I did not know we had come into the city till all the passengers left the car, and the conductor courteously told me we were at our journey's end.

When this happens to you in Boston, and you leave your car, you find yourself huddled on a steep sloping sidewalk, under the rain or snow, with a hundred or more other passengers, all eager, all wondering, all unprovided for. But I found in Sybaris a large glass-roofed station, from which the other lines of neighborhood cars radiated, in which women and even little children were passing from route to to route, under the guidance of civil and intelligent persons, who, strange enough, made it their business to conduct these people to and fro, and did not consider it their duty to insult the traveller. For a moment my mind reverted to the contrast at home; but not long. As I stood admiring and amused at once, a bright, brisk little fellow stepped up to me, and asked what my purpose was, and which way I would go. He spoke in Greek first, but, seeing I did not catch his meaning, relapsed into very passable Italian, quite as good as mine.

I told him that I was shipwrecked, and had come into town for assistance. He expressed sympathy, but wasted not a moment, led me to his chief at an office on one side, who gave me a card with the address of an officer whose duty it was to see to strangers, and said that he would in turn introduce me to the chief of the boat-builders; and then said, as if in apology for his promptness,

"[Greek: Chre xeiuon pareonta philein, ethelonta de pempein.]" "Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest."

He called to me a conductor of the red line, said [Greek: Xenos], which we translate guest, but which I found in this case means "dead-head," or "free," bowed, and I saw him no more.

"Strange country have I come to, indeed," said I, as I thought of the passports of Civita Vecchia, of the indifference of Scollay's Buildings, and of the surliness of Springfield. "And this is Sybaris!"

* * * * *

We sent down a tug to the cove which I indicated on their topographical map, and to the terror of the old fisherman and his sons, to whom I had sent a note, which they could not read, our boat was towed up to the city quay, and was put under repairs. That last thump on the hidden rock was her worst injury, and it was a week before I could get away. It was in this time that I got the information I am now to give, partly from my own observations, partly from what George the Proxenus or his brother Philip told me,—more from what I got from a very pleasing person, the wife of another brother, at whose house I used to visit freely, and whose boys, fine fellows, were very fond of talking about America with me. They spoke English very funnily, and like little school-books. The ship-carpenter, a man named Alexander, was a very intelligent person; and, indeed, the whole social arrangement of the place was so simple, that it seemed to me that I got on very fast, and knew a great deal of them in a very short time.

I told George one day, that I was surprised that he had so much time to give to me. He laughed, and said he could well believe that, as I had said that I was brought up in Boston. "When I was there," said he, "I could see that your people were all hospitable enough, but that the people who were good for anything were made to do all the work of the vauriens, and really had no time for friendship or hospitality. I remember an historian of yours, who crossed with me, said that there should be a motto stretched across Boston Bay, from one fort to another, with the words, 'No admittance, except on business.'"

I did not more than half like this chaffing of Boston, and asked how they managed things in Sybaris.

"Why, you see," said he, "we hold pretty stiffly to the old Charondian laws, of which perhaps you know something; here's a copy of the code, if you would like to look over it," and he took one out of his pocket. "We are still very chary about amendments to statutes, so that very little time is spent in legislation; we have no bills at shops, and but little debt, and that is all on honor, so that there is not much account-keeping or litigation; you know what happens to gossips,—gossip takes a good deal of time elsewhere,—and somehow everybody does his share of work, so that all of us do have a good deal of what you call 'leisure.' Whether," he added pensively, "in a world God put us into that we might love each other, and learn to love,—whether the time we spend in society, or the time we spend caged behind our office desks, is the time which should be called devoted to the 'business of life,' that remains to be seen."