ON DESERT ALTARS NORMA 416E By the Waters of Germany By NORMA LORIMER Author of " A Wife out of Esypt," etc. With a Preface by Douglas Sladen. Demy 8vo t doth gilt, with a coloured frontispiece and 16 other illustrations by MARGARET THOMAS and ERNA MICHEL, 12/6 net. This fascinating travel-book describes the land of the Rhine and the Black Forest, at the present time so much the centre of public interest. The natural and architectural beauties of Germany are too supreme for even the sternest German-hater to deny ; and this book describes them and the land around them well. But apart from the love-story which Miss Lorimer have weaved into the book, a particularly great interest attaches to her description of the home life of the men who, since she saw them, have deserved and received the con- demnation of the whole civilized world. By the Waters of Sicily By NORMA LORIMER Author of "By the Waters of Germany." etc. New and Cheaper Edition, reset from new type, Large Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, with a coloured frontispiece and 16 other illustrations, 6/-. This book, the predecessor of " By the Waters of Germany," was called at the time of its original publication " one of the most original books of travel ever published." It had at once a big success, but for some time it has been quite out of print. Full of the vivid colour of Sicilian life, it is a delightfully picturesque volume, half travel-book, half story ; and there is a sparkle in it, for the author writes as if glad to be alive in her gorgeously beautiful surroundings. LONDON : STANLEY PAUL & Co., 31 ESSEX STREET, W.C. New Six Shilling Novels THE SAILS OF LIFE .... Cecil Adair A GENTLEWOMAN OF FRANCE . Rene Boylesve THE PRUSSIAN TERROR . . Alexandre Dumas GREATER THAN THE GREATEST Hamilton Drummond THE HEIRESS OF SWALLOWCLIFFE E. Everett-Green HERNDALE'S HEIR v . THE PERSISTENT LOVERS. PASSION AND FAITH . . E. Everett-Green . A. Hamilton Gibbs , Dorothea Gerard THREE GENTLEMEN FROM NEW CALEDONIA R. D. Hemingway and Henry de Halsalle THE HOUSE OF MANY MIRRORS Violet Himt THE CREEPING TIDES . " . Kate Jordan ON DESERT ALTARS . . . Norma Lorimer THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH Archibald Marshall THE BLACK LAKE ._>, Sir William Magnay, Bart. MISS BILLY'S DECISION * Eleanor H. Porter MISS BILLY MARRIED , Eleanor H. Porter THE INK-SLINGER * : . . ^ . " Rita " SCHOOL FOR LOVERS ... . . E. B. de Rendon FANTOMAS . Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain TAINTED GOLD . H. Noel Williams ON DESERT ALTARS BY THE SAME AUTHOR A WIFE OUT OF EGYPT EIGHTH EDITION NOW READY. In Crown 8vo. Cloth gilt. 6s. The Standard says : " To most of us who live in England the problems of conflicting races that trouble people in other parts of the world never rear their ugly little heads. The difficulties of intercourse between white and brown, for instance, do not intrude themselves. And yet, as the rulers of a world-wide Empire, we have more reason than any other European people to be interested in such subjects. There are difficulties of the kind nearer home than India, as in Egypt, and it is in the land of the Pharaohs that Miss Lorimer has gone for the material to make her extremely interesting novel. Apart from its literary qualities and its excellent pictures of the highly coloured life in the near East, it gives us a very clear idea of the religious, political and social conditions of Egypt to-day." The Daily Telegraph says : " Miss Norma Lorimer, whose knowledge of Egyptian life has already been proved in other literary fields, has constructed a strong, well- wrought, and human story, in every way an inoffensive book and in many respects a very powerful one. " AT ALL LIBRARIES AND BOOKSELLERS. ON DESERT ALTARS NORMA LORIMER Author of " A Wife Out of Egypt " By the Waters of Sicily," etc. etc. LONDON STANLEY PAUL & GO 31 ESSEX ST., STRAND, W.C First published in rpr$ StacR Annex CONTENTS PART I CHAPTER PAGE I. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIDO AT CARTHAGE 9 II. ON THE THRESHOLD OF LIFE : ENTER THE BARON 26 III. THE BARONESS 42 IV. ENTER GWYNN STEVENS . , .46 V. ENTER SAMSON RATHBONE ... 55 VI. THE BARONESS'S PAST .... 59 VII. THE FLIGHT OF THE BARONESS . . 73 VIII. FAREWELL TO TUNIS . . .85 IX. BACK TO THE CAGE .... 88 X. GREY LIFE 99 XI. FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE . . . 108 XII. THE CREATION OF A HOME . . .115 XIII. CONFIDENCES 119 XIV. URIAH IN DAVID'S HOUSE . . .128 XV. THE RAINY DAY . . . . . 141 XVI. THE SPIDER'S WEB . . . .146 XVII. FEVERS HIGH AND Low . . .158 XVIII. ANXIETY FOR THE FUTURE . . . 164 XIX. VAIN ENDEAVOURS . . . .177 7 2137469 8 CONTENTS PART II CHAFTHEt FAO* I. PARTING ...... 182 II. THE POBTIC SYMPATHY OF NATURE . 187 in. APOLOGIA . 191 IV. THE SERPENT AND THE APPLB . . 102 V. SIB FBANK RECEIVES A MESSAGE . . 196 VI. THE GREAT SURRENDER .... 203 VII. REMORSE . -.' , . .209 VIIL IN PURGATORY 219 IX. SAMSON RETURNS THE FIRST ACT OF THE TRAGEDY 226 X. SAMSON HEARS ABOUT Grai . . . 233 XI. THE ORDEAL OF ALICE RATHBONE . . 258 XH. THE CHANGELING . . . . . 267 XIII. RE-ENTER Sm FRANK MACCABAEUS . 274 XIV. THE CATACLYSM 279 XV. ALICE'S FLIGHT . . . . .291 XVI. WHAT ALICE SAID TO FRANK MACCABAEUS . 299 XVH. THE " DEUS EX MACHINA " . . .304 XVIH. IN Brno's TOWN . . . . .313 XIX. " DE PROFUNDIS " 327 XX. IN THE WHITE BURNOUSE . . . 334 XXI. DUST THOU WAST 340 XXII. JOURNEYS END IN LOVERS' MEETINGS . 345 AFTERWORD , 354 ON DESEET ALTAKS PART I CHAPTER I IK THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIDO AT CARTHAGE A MAY moon lit up the desert which lies between Carthage and Tunis, and threw into relief the ruins of the vast Roman aqueduct which stretched " like the bleached vertebrae of some gigantic serpent " across the desolate plain, and jewelled with patches of green and red the masses of fallen masonry which constitute the ruins of Carthage. The coloured frag- ments were bits of ancient Numidian marbles which the light of the Southern moon, so like the quiet light of early morning, had not robbed of their beauty. The hushed sense of Africa, with its soundless deserts, its buried cities and civilizations, filled the listening distance. The white-domed tombs of Moham- medan saints and the white-vaulted cisterns which gave Punic Carthage its waters were the two arrestive features in the landscape. A girl and a man, both English, were wandering over the classic ground. Far behind them was a Sahara Arab in his desert dress smoking a scented cigarette. All that the word Africa means to the traveller whose ears and nerves are fresh to its silence and 10 ON DESERT ALTARS mystery, and whose mind is unprepared for its appeal to the emotions, was acting upon the senses of the girl who loved it with the love and unquestioning adoration of youth. The man at her side knew almost every step of the ground ; he was familiar with the secrets which its long-buried treasures have revealed to the modern world of the city of Dido, whose abominations were the abominations of the Sidonians, and whose romance is woven into the world's first history. He had spent many months at Carthage in his ardent Catholic days with the White Fathers. He had prayed with them, and dug with them, and had even fought with them when occasion demanded that they should prove their prowess as fighting priests. But that was in the days that were past ; not so long past if counted by years, for it was scarcely five, but very long when reckoned in the physiology of a man who passed through phases and beliefs, and exhausted experiences as rapidly and comprehensively as Gwynn Stevens. Alice Lindsay, his companion, had known him for about two months, the last two months of the amazing year which she had spent away from her home and her parents, who lived in the Black Country in England. As the man and the girl stood under the white light of the Carthage moon, the very moon which the devotees of Astarte had worshipped on that same ground, Gwynn waited for the- girl's answer. His entreaty had made them halt in their desultory wandering. During their walk he had been telling her about the journey he meant to take into Southern Tunisia, and how he would live there the true desert life among the desert peoples. With his knowledge of Arabic, and his present sympathy with the Moslem faith, he would be able to gain the friendship and sympathy of the natives. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIDO 11 They were standing in a little hollow in the desert ; his eyes were fixed on the girl's white eyelids. They were among her many charms. His persuasive arms were taxing her powers of resistance. To regain her will-power she unwound them and stood free. " No ! Gwynn," she said, " I can't. It is no good saying any more. I mustn't." " Then you don't love me ? " " Have you thought so when I kissed you ? Should I have kissed you if I had not loved you ? " " If you loved me you would trust me." " I do trust you your love for me, I mean as it is now ..." she paused. He seized her hands in his and drew her to him again. " There is no sense in the word love without trust, I don't look for mere passion. A man need not give his love to get that." " Can you trust yourself, Gwynn ? You have passed through so many phases . . . you have told me about them " She smiled entreatingly. " Suppose I am only a phase ? " " Well, supposing you are supposing your love for me is only a phase ! How can I tell ? How can you tell ? Nature takes our lives into her hands. Life is a cycle of phases. But I love you." He bent his head to kiss her. " How I love your sweet eyes and lips and ears." He pressed passionate lips on each feature as he spoke. " And I love your intellect, Alice ; I want to see what sort of a woman I can make of you. You are only a sweet girl at present. I want the developing of you I want it for my own. No one else must do it." The night of Africa had stolen the girl from herself. The passion of its silence had transformed her into a child of the desert, hi whom the elemental forces of nature were waking from their chrysalis sleep to vigorous life. 12 ON DESERT ALTARS England, vision-bound by unelemental things, had deserted the child of green hedges and dew-drenched fields. The night stillness of the Orient had baptized her in the waters of Lethe. Gwynn Stevens' arms were the arms of a practised lover, a lover who knew well the power that goes with tenderness, and the effect on virgin senses of a passion that is devout. In Alice he recognized a creature whose unconscious cravings were beautifully pure and unsoiled. With the feminine quality in his own nature which helped him to understand women so well, he had quickly grasped that to a girl of so fine a mental calibre as Alice, vulgarity of mere passion, or vulgarity in any sense would be intolerable, as indeed it was to himself. Alice's love for him was an inseparable part of the attack which her first contact with the Orient and its sensuous mysteries was making upon her youth. Un- consciously it was calling into demand a new eagerness for human sympathy, a new understanding of life. If her lover had chosen to let her decision about going with him slip into the background, and had kept her thoughts steeped hi the ether of romantic love, it is doubtful if the girl would have been able to with- stand his appeal. He was going into Southern Tunisia, to the very core of the desert ; to visit oasis cities which he had visualized for her as the land to which her new-found being belonged. He had encouraged and fed the " Wonder-lust" which, God knows how, had been born in the bones of this English girl, whose parents won- dered at so little, and found so little to wonder at that they had known no desire to stray beyond the little town in the Midlands in which they had been born and lived. But for once Gwynn's instinct failed him. He did IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIDO 13 not turn Alice's thoughts from the dread of outraging her parents' feelings which she would do if she went with him as his lover and not as his wife, to some topic, which, though steeped with love, would have appealed to her intellectual imagination and have made her forget ! It was when Alice was with someone else that she loved Gwynn most unquestioningly, and forgot her lack of trust in his character as a lover. He made other men appear dull and unappreciative ; the interests of their smaller minds bored her ; the foolish- ness of their ideas of amusements appeared vulgar. Gwynn never missed a point of beauty or interest in nature or in human beings. Alice knew he would always understand the things she had so often to hold back in her conversation with ordinary people. It is not what a bore says that irritates a woman ; it is what she cannot say to him. They knew what lay in each other's thoughts : when not together they unconsciously treasured up things to discuss when they met. They had instinc- tively mated : they were drawn to each other as naturally as birds, and if no law had forbidden their union, in it, for the time being at least, they would have known life in all its beauty and fullness of joy. But at the critical moment, when Alice's surrender to the romance of passion, and to the youthful vanity of developing her own life in her own way, hung on a very slender thread, England and her parents, and the horror of neglecting her duty of obedience to their commands, suddenly rushed in upon her love-bewildered senses, and sobered them. She had little, pathetically little, reason for loving her parents, who had shown her but scanty affection, and who had too plainly let her see that she was a thorn in their sides. Their middle-class admiration of conventional minds, and conventional mediocrity 14 ON DESERT ALTARS generally, did not permit them to adore the beautiful child who was theirs by some lusus Naturae. All that her selfish act would mean to them sprang in protest to her lips. " These are not your own ideas of what you think is right, and what you think is wrong, Alice. It is not your own wish that is making you hold back. You did not say I can't, you said I mustn't. That means that you are afraid of hurting your parents ; they need never know, sweetheart. Why should anyone know ? Your life is your own, and I swear that I won't do anything to spoil it ; I will only make it more beau- tiful." The words were poured out breathlessly, as though he grudged speaking them. " I will develop your life, and ideas, and show you all the beauty that God put into the world for man and woman to enjoy ; . . . the ways of love can be beautiful, dearest. Let me teach you." " Don't say that God puts them into the world ; ... I don't know yet how to tell which is God's work and which is the Devil's. . . . Love seems so simple and so beautiful, and yet mother would have it that all this sort of thing is the Devil's work." " What sort of work, dearest ? " His voice was indulgent ; he was speaking to a girl who had not yet put away childish ideas. " All this, our love, your kind of love, love without marriage." ." Of course she would. She has been taught to believe it is the Devil's work, just as she has been taught to say the Athanasian creed. She hasn't had the chance to think for herself. It is only one of her many inherited beliefs. We have left inherited beliefs, and all that behind us, dearest. . . . You know what you think of her ideas of life generally. She behaves as though it were wrong and immoral to show that she IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIDO 15 has any human feelings at all, even for the man whom she disobeyed her parents by marrying. . . . Come, confess ! you see, I remember all you have ever told me about her ; how starved your young life was for sympathy . . . I've had to teach you how to kiss." " Mother can't sympathize with what she hasn't felt herself, and I don't believe that when she was young anything in the whole world could have tempted her to do without the marriage ceremony. To have lived with a good man to whom she was not married would have seemed a far greater sin in her eyes than to have lived with a bad man to whom she had been married in the Church, even if the man did not think one way or another about the sacraments of the Church. ..." Alice paused. " All the same, both father and she trusted me. They let me leave home to satisfy my longing to see something of the world because they believed that they could trust me. . . . You see, Gwynn, in spite of all that I constantly did, or rather did not do which annoyed mother still more, not going more than once a week to Church, not teaching in the Sunday-school, not taking any interest in what she called ' work for others ' (which really meant interfering in the parish) I never deceived her. She learnt to rely implicitly on my word, and on my obeying the unwritten law. . . . When I was in Germany of course I did ..." Alice paused. f " You did what ? " Her lover turned her face eagerly to his. " You did what ? Some iniquity you have hidden from me ? " " No ! but I did many things which would have shocked mother. You see, the Baron and Baroness belong to a set which she does not know even exists a set, to tell you the truth, dear, which every girl ought to know more about before being plunged into it as I was. I was a provincial ignoramus when I went to 16 ON DESERT ALTARS Germany. Yet somehow it didn't much matter, be- cause I never felt tempted to do anything which mother would have condemned as really wicked . . . anything like this . . . because ..." " Because why ? " His arms went round her. He knew it was because she had not loved, and without love he knew that she would never be tempted, but he wished to hear her lips say the words. " Why ? " he insisted. " Because I didn't know then what love meant. The men I met were so frightfully gay and unreliable." " You darling ! I wanted to hear you say ' because I never loved anyone but you, Gwynn.' Let me hear you say, ' I love you, Gwynn.' ' " I adore you, Gwynn." *' Not sufficiently to trust me, sweetheart ? " She hesitated. " You don't understand me, Gwynn. My feelings for you are something I can't explain. I love you, but that does not express all I really feel. You have made life so interesting, so altogether new ; I don't think I can ever step back again into the old dull vision of things. You have coloured my world for me You mean so much more than love," she faltered. "Dear one," he said, in more serious tones, "do you know if I loved you less I would marry you. I would marry you to secure you for myself, and just run the risk of being able to make you happy for the rest of your life. It's because I love you, and worship the girl you are, that I don't want to spoil the maturer years of your womanhood. I won't tie you down not yet. You are only a child-woman. I can do far more for your individuality and nature as a lover. I want you to remain an individual. Have you ever considered, dearest, that a woman,_according to the Prayer Book, ceases to be the same individual after her marriage ? Indeed, she ceases to be an individual IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIDO 17 she no longer ' subsists as one.' For it says, ' and they two shall be one flesh ' ; this is the great mystery. I want you to come with me, and live under the African skies the free life of the desert people. For one little part of your existence on this earth I want you to taste the sweetness and the simplicity of it." She trembled in his arms. He looked into her eyes. " I know what you are thinking, why you are holding back. It is a woman's natural fear that instantly springs to your mind. You need have no such fears, I swear to you, beloved. Can't you trust me ? I am no boy." She returned his look wonderingly. Against his own he felt her cheeks quickly warm with the rush of blood to the clear skin. " If anything like that happened," he said very gravely, " I would get six clergymen of the Church of England to marry us under your mother's very nose. Do you believe me ? Will you trust me ? " He kissed her so rapturously that she could not help laughing, even though his words confounded her more woefully than he imagined. " Can't you trust me for that, little girl ? Can't you believe that I am not a scoundrel ? Men and women make each other. . . . You are not yet half made, beloved. . . . Let me have a little hand in the making of the Alice that is to be." " And you ? " she said. " Have so many women had a hand in your making that there is nothing left for me to do ? It isn't quite fair ! " He caught her to his breast. " When you have taken me in hand who knows what I may develop into ? In a few months I may be imploring you to let me sanctify our unholy happi- ness by the holy bonds of unhappy matrimony." In spite of her youthful scorn of her mother's un- questioning orthodoxy, Alice felt pained at her lover's 18 ON DESERT ALTARS light manner of talking about institutions and beliefs of which she had been taught to speak seriously and reverently. She was young enough to be ashamed of her feelings, so she said laughingly : " As a Catholic, how could you marry a Protestant ? Your Church now forbids it, and if I am anything I am a Protestant, and if you are anything I suppose you are a Catholic ? " "No, I am no longer a Catholic." Alice looked at him with questioning eyes. She knew he was no longer the ardent devotee he had been in the first years of his perversion the days he had spent at Carthage with the White Fathers but she imagined that he still professed the Catholic faith. " Then what are you ? " She laughed as she added, " A Moslem ? " To her surprise he said, " Yes, perhaps, if I am anything." He watched the girl's face, which betrayed the flight her imagination had taken. "No, I have no harem ! That is what your mind has flown to ? You would be my only wife " She did not answer. " It is sad," he said, " that to most people's minds the word Moslem, or Mohammedan, far more surely calls up the vision of an unlimited number of wives than the believer in one God whose prophet was Mohammed. Yet to-day comparatively few Moham- medans have more than one wife, in cities at least, they're too expensive a luxury ; they belong to other days." " I see," she said slowly. " But it sounds so strange, an Englishman being a Mohammedan ! " " I have taken no vows," he said. " I cannot pray in the mosques. It's a very simple and a very beautiful faith if you shake off or ignore the superstitions attached to it ; they have come down since Pagan times, and the word harem, which sounds so shocking to the English ears, means ' sacred.' It is the sacred IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIDO 19 portion of a man's house which is set apart for his women ; it is sacred to him and forbidden to strangers." " I know very little about the Prophet's teachings," Alice said. " Most people confuse the observances of the Oriental customs with the obeying of the Prophet's words. You could learn a good deal by reading the Koran, of course ; but it is very long." He hooked his arm in hers. " I will teach you some of the beliefs of Islam. Its ethics are as manifold as the sands of the sea, because Mohammed left nothing unsaid regarding the moral duties of man ; his system of principles is wonderful ; his creed and dogmas are summed up hi the words : Absolute surrender to one God, and the belief that Mohammed is his Prophet." " To me," Alice said, " the Moslem peoples are so beautifully reverent ; I think their religion must be beautiful too." " It is beautiful," he said, " and strong ; it is a dignified and strong religion for a dignified strong people." " Which do you think it is, their natural breeding or the influence of their religion which make their manners so calm and dignified ? One talks of the good breeding and reserve and dignity which go with aristocratic blood in England ; but I have never seen anyone in England with so much the air of the perfect gentleman as the Arab who washes out the marble floors of our hotel with a palm-leaf broom. He carries up the visitor's luggage on his back, and wears only one garment, but he is never without his scarlet carnation behind his ear. I love him ! he is beautiful." " The poorest Arab loves the rich scent of flowers. Your floor-mopper, when the whiff from the scarlet carnation drifts to his nostrils, sees visions of the 20 ON DESERT ALTARS gardens of Paradise which his soul is to enjoy when Allah permits him to cease his earthly toil. But it is awfully difficult to tell whether it is his religion and the calm which its philosophy bestows upon its children or whether it is a characteristic of his race. The Arab is a natural gentleman, but I am inclined to think that the profound calm which comes from his absolute resignation to the will of Allah has added greatly to his personal dignity. That atmosphere of aloofness which surrounds him places him far above the impetuous and emotional nations, Italian's for in- stance charming though they are in their own way," he shrugged his shoulders "and infinitely above the mannerless Anglo-Saxons, of course." " If you became a Mohammedan we could judge of cause and result," Alice laughed. " We should know that the change was really due to the religion of the prophet ! Do Western peoples when they turn Moslems become more dignified, more like the lordly Arab ? " " If you are cheeky, you know what I will do," he said, and he did it. They had turned their backs on Carthage, that Cittd Morta of the immortal dead : they had spent the hours of midday and afternoon and sunset wander- ing about it from point to point, and they had picnicked amid its ruins. The girl had listened with eager ears and senses to her lover's tales drawn from the history of the place. He was an excellent raconteur, and he had at one time been " intoxicated with Carthage " as St. Augustine, who came as a youthful Pagan to the city to study rhetoric at its famous university, became " intoxicated with God." He had led her from place to place, ever mindf ul of the fact that, as he loved and desired her, he must appeal to her senses through her IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DIDO 21 intellect ; for, as yet, Alice's " sex was in her soul." He must draw her to him like a bird to its snare by thrilling her imagination and feeding her " Wonder- lust " with the dramas and scenes he constructed for her on the very stage upon which they had been enacted. At first she had been so overwhelmed by the abject nothingness of Carthage that it had meant little more to her than a mass of fallen stones and sandhills of accumulated rubbish. f: The holy Sidi-Bou-Said, an unspoilt Arab village which lies at the Cape Carthage end of the famous peninsula, had delighted her far more than the ruins of the city which are such a pathetic illustration of Cato's immortal words, " Delenda est Carthago." If she had been by herself she would have left classic Carthage alone and spent all her time in the quiet white village where roses and geraniums and exquisite flowers made an earthly Paradise around the tombs of Tunisian saints. Mohammedan saints to this day wish to be buried there because it holds, in their belief, the tomb of St. Louis, the great Christian king and saint. According to local history St. Louis died a good Moslem, and so it is that at one end of Carthage the French king is worshipped as a " Marabout," and at the other, hi a costly cathedral erected to his memory, as a Catholic saint. By the magic of his enthusiasm for the place Gwynn converted her to its charm. Just now it was hers to stand upon the spot from which she could best see the double war-harbour of the Carthaginians, lying like twin pools of clear light, land-locked from the blue Tunisian bay, and, beyond the expanses of African waters, the soft outline of the Bou Kornein hills. As they stood in the great unshadowed sunshine he told her of the scenes of splendour and of tragedy which those now shrunken harbours had witnessed. 22 ON DESERT ALTARS " Magnify them as much as you can," he said, " their form is not changed, and then try to picture to yourself our entire British Navy lying inside them, and don't forget that the Carthaginians were as proud of then* splendid navy as we are of ours. Their fleet was the symbol and seal of their commerce and colonization. Think of what we should feel at the conclusion of an unsuccessful war with a strong Euro- pean power if the terms of peace included the order that we must see our entire fleet burnt before our eyes. Just imagine an English admiral being compelled to tow out five hundred vessels from these two harbours of shining water into the open sea so that his ships might be burnt before the eyes of the weeping citizens. And that was what actually happened when Has- drubal accepted the Romans' conditions of peace, when he was sent as the leader of the peace party to Rome to plead the cause of the conquered. In her Punic days the very poorest citizens in Carthage used to go into mourning, and the city draped its streets with funeral flags, when any disaster occurred to their beloved navy from storms at sea, or hi battle." Gwynn made Alice see as a living creature Queen Dido sitting at the feet of -