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of Holy Saint George, not Sileese." "Demetri, it must be Sileese," he replied, "for she is small, and I am a poor man. It must be Sileese,” he said again. "Sileese, Visla, Karvoon, and Lala; but, hush! the Klephts are here."

When the goad is pressed into the ox, the flesh creeps to the pain, the flesh gathers itself up like a man's hand when it closes. It was so now with my heart, as I thought of Sileese, my little loving Sileese. And when I looked at the Klephts who had come to us, I felt that I was very little and weak. But they they took no notice of me; I was only a boy.

"Make haste, Stavros"-they said to my father-"make haste, for our captain is waiting on the mountain; the goats-where are they?"

"They shall be yours directly, noble men," answered my father. Then he turned to me and said, "Quick Demetri, fetch them out of the fold." And as I went to the door of the fold I heard him say, "Kathesate" (sit you down), "I will bring you wine from the hut-good wine and strong." For my father was a poor man, and had great fear of the Klephts. He wished them to call him friend.

When I entered the fold Sileese ran with bleats to meet me. Her voice was very small, but it filled my ears, it stirred my blood. And I would have wished for some white powder1 to place in the wine of the Klephts. But I had it not. I could only drive Visla, Karvoon, and Lala out of the fold, and, with Sileese following at my heels, return to the Klephts. When Sileese saw the strangers she ran a little to one side, and gazed at them with timid eyes. "Sileese," I said; "come, Sileese." And with the sound of my voice she lost her terror, and came to me again. The Klephts, they laughed at this, and in their laughter I found hope. "Sileese," I said again. "Come, pretty one." Then she did what I had taught her to do. She stood upon her hind legs, and rested her front feet against my white foustanella. I stroked her soft neckshe bleated with joy. I pretended to run away; she followed me here, thereeverywhere.

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Then I returned again to the Klephts, who were drinking the wine that my father had brought to them, and I begged them for the good God's sake to spare to me my little friend,Sileese. There were tears in my eyes, there was grief in my heart; but I-I was a boy, and they mocked me as they drank their wine. I took off my crimson fez; I knelt at their feet, but they mocked me. The devils! And when they had finished the wine, they pushed me to one side, saying, "As pame" (Let us go). But Sileese would not be persuaded from me like the other goats. She ran hither and thither-she ran till they caught her, and tied a rope about her soft neck. Then they dragged her away after them, and I saw them going further and further from me. I could hear Sileese crying to me; I could see them walking betwixt the trees, over the patches of white snow. They were growing small with distance; I could scarcely hear Sileese. I could not bear it; I ran after them. Again I begged them with humble words to spare to me Sileese, but they struck me, and I fell with hot tears into a bush. Many times I ran to them, and many times they struck me. They were angry that I should follow them, and their blows stained my white shirt with blood. But I followed them, through and out of the wood, up and over the little hills, on and beyond to the great mountain, for I loved Sileese.

At length they, and I following after -we came where the river comes from the great mountain. It was very full, and its white and angry water was running hastily betwixt tall black rocks. To walk by its side was difficult, for, though there was a path, it was steep and rough. For the goats it was no trouble, but for us others it was difficult. We went more slowly. My breath came quicker. And now the path was narrow, and now the path was broad; and now it ran straight, and now it ran crooked, as if afraid of the great rocks that leant towards the stream. It was a wild place, and they were wild men who were carrying Sileesę away from me.

It was thus with us, and in this place, when I said to myself, "I will go a little further, but only a little further." For, Afendi, my hope of helping Sileese was

dying, and I feared the captain on the mountain. He was a bad man, and if he saw me, who knows but that he would kill me? "I will go," I said to myself; "yes, I will go as far as that great rock yonder, which the Klephts are just about to pass; then I will make haste to them, and once more, and for the last time, beg for Sileese."

When the Klephts came to the base of the great rock they hurried round it, and I was making haste to follow them, when a crash like thunder came to me, and passed away with the waters that were hurrying betwixt the black rocks. Then I saw them running, stumbling back towards me, but without Sileese. In a minute they were by my side; in another they were passing beyond and round another rocky corner. I was alone.

But it was not thunder that I had heard-and that I knew, I who have heard the soldiers' guns speak upon the mountains. And when I went on to the rock, and, turning it, saw blue-coated ones with rifles in their hands, I was not surprised, and ran to Sileese, and took the cord from about her neck. "Bah!" 1 one of them said, "look at the little Klepht! But he is brave-braver than those others." And with this he pointed his rifle at me as if to shoot me. "I-I am no Klepht like those others," I answered. "And this is Sileese, who is mine." "Den peirazei," they answered, and, driving the goats before them, they followed gently after the Klephts. For they were in no hurry to catch them, they had not had the order.

And as they went they talked of many things-of how they had met the Klephts by chance, of how some day they would shoot them when they wished their bullets to go straight. And then, when we arrived at the little hills, they stopped and had food. It was then that I said to them, "I will take the goats to my father. Adio!" So saying, I called to Sileese to come close to me, and prepared to drive Visla, Karvoon, ana Lala towards our wood. But I had not money, and the soldiers have power. "Not so fast, little Klepht," they said, "the goats are ours. But you,

1 Bah! here an exclamation of astonishment. 2 Soldiers, or military police.

get you gone; we will not take you yet to prison."

To call me a little Klepht, it was silly! Gian, the tallest of the soldiers-he knew me, he had beaten my father till my father had given him a chicken. And he he to call me a little Klepht!

But they would not listen when I told them of Sileese, that she was my friend. "Little fool," they said; "we will eat her!" I-I was a boy, they said, as they drank their wine; and Sileese-Sileese was a goat, who was small and fat. Then their words passed by me, and they tied Sileese and the other goats to a bush.

I was tired, I was hungry, but I would not ask of their bread. I was sad, I was angry, but I would not speak. It was thus with me and the soldiers till they rose to their feet and set out for the village of Piltsa, where was their axiomatikos (officer).

As I saw them going from me with Sileese and the goats, there came to me a longing for help, a wish that I was strong enough to cast them down upon the white snow, and beat them with their guns. But when I heard them urge on the goats with cruel words, when I heard them laugh, I was as water that runs it knows not why, I was as a weak sheep that follows its herd. Each step that I took brought sobs to my throat, each bush that I passed was veiled in the mist of my tears, yet I followed the stratiotais. I followed them over the little hills. I paused when they paused, and I heard their bullets fly buzzingly over the hills to a distant mark. Some of the bullets hit the tree that they were firing at, and I saw white splinters fly from its trunk; but the others-where did they go? Who knows? And they-they did not go to the village beyond to ask, but continued their way.

They were very happy, those soldiers; they began to sing-to sing a tragoudo about Ali Pacha. They were coming close to their home at Piltsa, those soldiers, and they sang. But of me, who was far behind them, they took no notice, for their eyes were upon the blue smoke that rose from the cottages of Piltsa. In a little while I could see them pass beneath leafless trees, to go,

some to one side, and some to the other side of grey trunks. In a little while I, too, was passing beneath these trees, and could see the pink and white walls of the cottages of Piltsa. The door of one of these cottages was closing, but not so quickly that I could not see the blue-coated one who was shutting it.

"Pig!" I muttered to myself, as I saw him; "I have been to Piltsa before. I will go to your officer at the big house." When I came to him, that officer, he took me by the shoulder and asked me of the blood that was upon my shirt. His eyes were kind, though they laughed. His voice was stern, but his ears were ready to listen. And I told to him that which I have told to you, Afendi. And I begged him for the good God's sake to save Sileese from his soldiers, who had robbed me of her. My words came quicker than my sobs, my tzarouchia (shoes), my fez, I took them

off and waited.

“Come,” said he, as he took up his glittering sword. "Come, you shall have your Sileese.” And with that he quitted his beautiful house, and I followed him. He walked with long strides, his sword it went jingle-jangle over the rough stones - he was officer, and he was going to save my Sileese.

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From The Contemporary Review. THE NEW SAYINGS OF CHRIST. Mr. Grenfell and Mr. Hunt have presented the world in general with a document of the greatest interest; while to theological scholars they have given one of the prettiest problems conceivable, in the writing which they have christened “Móyıα 'Iŋσou." Egypt is constantly yielding up fragments which excite and tantalize us almost unbearably; and now she has surpassed herself. Here we have what purport to be fresh sayings of the most important person who ever lived; and these are preserved to us on a single leaf of papyrus, badly mutilated, and, as a glance at the facsimile will show, extremely hard to read.

During the next few months we may expect edition after edition of these "Logia" from England, France, and Germany. We shall have conjectures

good, bad, and worse than bad, on the text, and we shall be told what the fragment is, when and where it was composed, what the lost portions contained, what the surviving portions mean, and what the relation of it all is to our four Gospels. But though we shall certainly learn a good deal, and probably be enabled to fill up the gaps in the second page of the text, I doubt whether we shall get any work that is on the whole more cautious and sensible than the editio princeps.

When he came to the door of the soldier's cottage he pushed it open-my heart was with his strong arm. As he entered I pressed close to him, and my eyes sought eagerly for Sileese. She was lying upon her side on the mud floor, there was crimson blood coming from a great gash in her throat. There was a blue-coated devil by her side with a knife in his hand; her blood was dripping from the point of the cold steel. I sprang at him; I would have gripped his knife, I would have buried it in his heart. But the cunning one was too quick for me. I turned to Sileese, her yellow eyes were dimming with the dews of death. Her bleat came to me as from the summit of some lofty rock. She stretched her little limbs out, she sharply from the background of known

was dead, and never again should Sileese and I wander over the hills together. Never again—

NEIL WYNN WILLIAMS.

It is not the purpose of this article to answer any of the great questions in Christian "origins" which are sure to be raised in connection with this fragment. The time is not ripe for that. The process of assimilation of new documents is always a long one; and a document so new as the "Logia" demands years rather than weeks or months for its proper appreciation. That which on a first reading seems so unlike anything we have seen-which stands out so

Christian literature-will eventually, no doubt, find its context and its environment, and drop into them naturally; but that will not be for some time to come.

It is, however, already possible to point out what the fragment is not, and to indicate the directions in which the nearest parallel to it may be found; and that is what I shall attempt to do in the following pages.

I.

In the first place, then, this document is not a leaf of a Gospel-not, at least, of such a gospel as we know anything about.

A great many kinds of books have been called Gospels at different times, but no extant recension or fragment of any of these leads us to suppose that they had room for such a collection of detached sayings as is contained in the leaf from Oxyrhynchus. Of the "Gospel of the Egyptians," a book which has been mentioned in connection with this fragment, we possess certain scraps, the chief one being a dialogue of our Lord with Salome; and from Hippolytus and Epiphanius we learn that it contained esoteric utterances of Christ to the Apostles. The "Gospel of Philip," of which we have one fragment, seems to have been a "Gnostic" writing, very much like the "Pistis Sophia," an extant work which represents Philip as the special recorder of the teaching of Jesus after the Resurrection. The very title of the "Gospel of Eve," again, transports us into a visionary sphere totally unconnected with the earthly life of our Lord; and the solitary quotation from it, preserved by Epiphanius, confirms the impression we derive from the title. Furthermore, we know enough of the Gospels called of the "Hebrews," of the "Twelve," of the "Ebonites," of "Peter," to see that in form at least they resembled our canonical Gospels; while those of "James" and of "Thomas" we actually possess the first, perhaps, in its original shape, the latter in a shortened form-and we know that they dealt with the parentage and infancy of Christ by way of direct narrative, with little of direct doctrinal utterance

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Another class of Gospels was that connected with the names of individual

heretics-for example, Basilides and Marcion. Marcion's Gospel, however, is well known to have been a mutilated form of St. Luke, while the attribution to Basilides of anything purporting to be a Gospel is in all probability a mistake.

All this goes to show that the books known as Gospels were of a systematic and coherent character, and were either lives of Christ or continuous reports of His teaching, not collections of sayings which had no internal bond of connection with each other.

If one were forced to fix on some one of the spurious Gospels whose names are known to us as the source of the "Logia," I think I should suggest the "Traditions" or "Gospel of Matthias" as the most likely. We have three short quotations from it, all of which are ethical precepts; and almost all the writers who speak of it are connected with Egypt. Yet I do not think it really probable that our sayings are a part of this book. The formula "Jesus" saith," which serves to introduce each saying in our fragment, is not very suitable to an apostle recording his reminiscences of his Master's words. There are, besides, indications Matthias, in company with Philip and Thomas, was represented by the Egyptian Gnostics as a special recipient of Christ's esoteric teachings after the Resurrection, a fact which makes it probable that, if we had the "Gospel of Matthias," we should find it to be a book of the same general character as the "Pistis Sophia."

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In the next place, this fragment does not belong to the work which people often describe as the "Logia of Papias."

It should be remembered that the work of Papias was not called “Logia,” but "Expositions of Logia of the Lord" λογιών κυριακῶν ἐξηγήσεις and both the title and the remains of the book indicate that the proportion of "expositions" which it contained must have been largely in excess of "Logia." Its. form, too, must have been more elaborate than that of the new fragment. However small in intelligence Papias may have been (and Eusebius thought

were only beginning, or had not yet begun, to be written. It may be a collection of extracts from one or more written Gospels. Does the form of it help us to a conclusion?

him very small), he had some preten- Lord made at a time when Gospels sions to graces of style. It is difficult to imagine that he would have incorporated in his book a section so very unliterary and so miscellaneous in character as this is without diluting it with some measure of exposition. However, it is wasting time to prove that this fragment cannot be from Papias. One has but to read the specimens we have of his work to be convinced that it was of a widely different complexion. And if we may extend our purview to the fragments quoted from "the Presbyters" by Irenæus, some of which are pretty certainly from the "Expositions" of Papias, we shall probably realize that the question is hardly worth debating.1

What, then, is this fragment? It may be a collection of sayings of our

1 Shall we ever recover a copy of the five books of Papias? Egypt has seemingly unlimited possibilities, and may yet give them up. Syria, too, is not entirely exhausted; and there may have been a Syriac version of the work, though I do not know that any mention of such a thing has been brought to light. But in the West, what are our chances? We know that in or about 1218 the church of Nîmes possessed a "thick volume," containing "Librum Popiæ, Librum de Verbis Domini." To be sure, this may have been a copy of the Lexicon of the Papias who lived in the eleventh century, bound up with a copy of Augustine "DeVerbis Domini." Still, it is not very likely that these two books would be bound up along with other tracts in one volume; and, after all, the Latin version of Iranæus comes to us from the South of France, and the second century dialogue of Jason and Papiscus was translated into Latin by a cleric in that part of the world. So that, on the whole, it is most probable that that was a true Papias in Latin at Nimes, though it is not there now.

I am not at all sure that there may not have been a copy in England also in the fifteenth century. John Boston, the Bury monk and bibliographer, includes Papias of Hierapolis in the list of writers whose works he had seen in monastic libraries. But not all Boston's work is in print,

and, until it is, we shall not know whether he actually did see the book, or whether he merely put down the name because it occurred in Je. rome's catalogue of ecclesiastical writers, which is one of his chief sources.

Almost every considerable monastic library catalogue contains two or three mentions of Papias; but in all these cases it is fairly certain that the author of the dictionary is meant.

The leaf which we have is marked with the number eleven; and if it be at all fair to build anything on such meagre data, I would say that it seems likely that all the ten preceding leaves contained matter similar to this; because ten leaves of the size of ours would not contain any important writing to which this could be an appendix.

Then, again, if we look at the structure of the document, it is very difficult to make it fit into any class of sacred writings of which we have any specimens. The repeated formula, "Jesus saith," is so bare, so jejune, that one cannot conceive its occurring in any book which contained anywhere portions of narrative. It would not, however, be inappropriate either to a series of extracts from a larger book, or to a collection of sayings which contained sayings and nothing else.

Now I suppose it to be true that books composed exclusively of precepts or "gnomic" utterances are distinctively Oriental in character. Certain it is that in looking for parallels to the "Logia," so far as form is concerned, we find the most striking general resemblances in writings like the Jewish "Pirke Aboth," or "Sayings of the Fathers." If we turn over the pages of this, we are constantly met by the simple formulæ, "Abtalion said"; "Shammai said"; "Rabbi said:" "He used to say." The Greek collections, such as Plutarch's "Apophthegmata Laconica," are not of the same kind. They consist of a series of short anecdotes, which specify the circumstances that gave rise to the saying.

It is probable enough that the literature of Persia and India would supply striking resemblances alike in form and substance to the document we are discussing. These, if they exist, will be produced in due time. At present I merely wish to indicate that it is a pos

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