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strong spirit is not swayed by promises of reward. He knows well what is in store for him; that his own death must follow close on the death of Hector; why then should he make haste to draw on his doom by fighting for those who have done him such dishonor? Nor will he accept the hand of Agamemnon's daughter;

Thetis ascends to Zeus, and tells him of the wrong that has been done to her son; she asks for vengeance, and her prayer is granted in spite of the fear of Here's displeasure. Thetis seeks to console her son in his grief at the death of Patroclus, and at her request the immortal arms are fashioned by Hephæstus, in order that Achilles may wear them in place of the arms which have become the spoil of There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by Hector. And when Achilles is dead The-Who would gladly be bride to the far, young Loch.

tis assembles the sea-nymphs, her companions, to do him honor. "Forth from the sea came thy mother with the deathless maidens of the waters, when they heard the tidings; and a wonderful wailing rose along the deep, and trembling fell on the limbs of all the Achæans. Round thee stood the daughters of the ancient one of the seas, making piteous moan, and they clad thee in raiment incorruptible. And the Muses nine, each to the other replying, with sweet voices began the dirge, and there was not an Argive but wept, so mightily rose up the clear strain. Thus for seventeen days and nights continually did we all bewail thee, immortal gods and mortal men.”

invar.

He remains inactive by the seashore, with his friend Patroclus, delighting himself with music and song, the arts learned from Chiron.

One concession only, as the distress of the Greeks deepen, will he make: Patroclus may take his armor and join in the battle. Patroclus is slain at the hand of Hector. Then an uncontrollable grief and desire for vengeance possesses him; he is reconciled to Agamemnon, and takes the field in haste, for his rage will allow him neither to eat nor sleep. The fierceness of his nature causes him to treat the dead body of Hector with inhuman cruelThe progress of life is in accordance ty; he attaches it to his chariot and drags with its beginning. The preceptors of it in triumph round the walls of Troy. Achilles were Phoenix and Chiron, the But the Iliad does not close till this fierce most righteous of the Centaurs. Phoenix outburst is passed away; warned by was sent to Achilles, while yet a child, to superhuman voices he surrenders the teach him to be a speaker of words and body for burial. The will of the gods is a doer of deeds. Hence arose a relation conveyed by Thetis to her son; in the of affectionate regard between the master dead of night Priam arrives, by divine and his pupil. For this reason he is guidance, at the tent of Achilles to ask chosen, with Ajax and Odysseus, to visit for Hector's body. Achilles and all with Achilles in his tent, and move his resolu- him are struck with wonder at the sight tion not to assist the Greeks. He en- of the aged king, who addresses himself treats Achilles to relent: "Subdue thy in tones of supplication to the chief. mighty heart, it is not fitting for thee to "Think of thy father, who is even as I cherish a pitiless spirit; even the gods am on the threshold of age. It may be may be moved, whose power and honor that those who dwell about him are pressand might are greater than thine. Yea! ing him sore, and there is no one to ward even them with sacrifice and fat of vic-off bale and bane. Yet, even so, he has tims a man may turn aside, offering up prayers whensoever he has gone astray and done amiss." If, on the other hand, Achilles is resolute in his determination to return home, and leave Agamemnon and the Greeks to their fate, how can he remain behind? "Nay! I would not, even though God himself were to give me the assurance that he would strip off my age and make me young and strong as when I left Hellas. I it was who made thee what thou art, O godlike prince." Achilles remains immovable even to the entreaties of Phoenix, but he bids him stay in the tent while the others return with his refusal to Agamemnon.

the joy of hearing that thou art living
still, and all his days he is in hope to be-
hold thee on thy return from Troy. Have
respect unto the gods, have pity on me,
remember thine own father, though I am
more worthy of pity, for I have done what
no man upon earth has yet borne to do -
I have put to my lips the hand which slew
my son.' Then all wept, Priam for his
son, Achilles for his aged father, and for
Patroclus his dead friend.

At length Achilles raises Priam from his suppliant posture and places him on a seat. "Let us cease from sorrow and woe, nothing is gained by lamentation: The it is the fate which the gods have decreed

for men, that they should live in grief and gentleness and firmness, of perfect truth pain." Priam refuses to be seated so and perfect modesty, as we see in Naulong as Hector lies in the tent without sicaa. She mingles with grace among funeral rites. Achilles rushes forth and her maidens, yet like Artemis amid her gives command that the body be washed nymphs, "easily is she known though all and anointed and duly clothed; not so are fair." She expresses with simple much from reverence for Priam as for truth to her companions the impression fear of himself. Should Priam see Hector made upon her by Odysseus: "Would in his bruised and mangled state, he might that such an one were my husband, dwellbe unable to restrain his grief, and the ing here, and that it might please him to heart of Achilles would then be stirred stay with us." Yet she will not tell her within him to slay the king. This atten- father the true reason which makes her tion to the corpse he cannot show without so busy in taking the household clothes breathing a prayer to Patroclus. "Be to the river pools to wash them there. not angry with me, if in Hades thou hear-"She was ashamed to speak of marriage est that I have restored Hector." When to her father." the corpse has thus been tended and ransomed, Achilles insists that Priam shall remain for the feast, and till the morning. He also undertakes to restrain the Grecian host for nine days that due honor may be done to the dead.

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To Oydsseus, as he emerges from the river, after his long sea journey, and supplicates her aid, she appears a goddess, or if not, "Thrice blessed are thy father and mother, thrice blessed thy brethren; surely their hearts glow with gladness Thus the poet softens the almost super- when they see thee, so fair a flower, enterhuman fierceness of the great chieftain.ing the dance. Never have mine eyes He is hospitable; he weeps at the thought seen thy like among mortals of his aged, solitary father; he pities nor woman. In Delos once I saw so Priam and knows well how melancholy is goodly a thing, a sapling of a palm-tree the lot of mankind. He surrenders the springing by the altar of Apollo." Her body of Hector, but not without a pang; intelligence is shown in her advice to friendship and humanity are at war within | Achilles on his entrance to the town; him. The description of Horace im- king's daughter though she be, she is well piger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer- does aware of the existence of scandal and not express the whole man; he is all this and something more. The harsh side which he shows to the Greeks and to Hector covers a gentle feeling for Briseis, Patroclus, Phoenix, and Peleus. In his lips also are put some of the great ethical sayings of the Homeric poems, as "Hateful to me as the gates of hell is the man who saith one thing with his lips and hideth another in his heart." Nevertheless, the harder side is the more prominent, and in this Achilles is typical of the historical Greek, whose decisive qualities were not "sweetness and light." If we do not meet with an Achilles in the history of Athens, we meet with an Alcibiades, that lion's whelp who destroyed the womb from which he sprang.

prudently avoids giving occasion to any on her own account. For this prudence her father subsequently chides her, and holds her guilty of inhospitality, because she did not conduct Odysseus straight to the palace. Odysseus shields her by a statement which is not quite the truth, ascribing to his own hesitation what is really due to the caution of the princess. She had said: "So long as we are passing along the fields, go on quickly with my maidens behind the mules and chariots, and I will lead the way; but when we come to the city wait there in the grove of Athene till I and the maidens have reached my father's house." But Odysseus in relating the incident alters it thus: "She bade me follow with her company, Let us turn from Achilles to Nausicaa, but I would not for fear and shame, lest the Phæacian princess, so well known to thy heart should be darkened at the all readers of the Odyssey. If, as some sight." Lastly, when Odysseus is preparhave thought, we may judge of the civil-ing for his departure, Nausicaa stands by ization of an age from the feeling which it the door of the hall and speaks a parting exhibits towards women, we shall certain-word: "Fare thee well; see that thou ly have to regard the Homeric age as highly civilized. Hardly in any other character of fiction - certainly in no other character which has come down to us in Greek literature, shall we find the same mixture of freedom and intelligence, of

remember me in thine own country, for to me thou owest thy life's ransom."

Fresh as the morning, beautiful as day, "like a dewdrop, purer than the purest," fairest vision where all is magically fair, Nausicaa is unique in the poetry of

Hellas. She is not a Helen whose beauty | sance to the late sleepers of the pensions is at once a nation's wonder and its woe; as the music of the latter is no doubt nor a vestal whose soul, like an altar fire, of an evening to the early-sleeping threshconsumes her very being in its heaven-ers themselves. Of course there is a ward flame. Gentle and courageous, great waste of power in this, as the quansimple and prudent, modest and naïve, tity of grain grown is quite inconsideradignified and gracious, she stands at the ble, and a threshing-machine or two, such threshold of life, in the bright hope of her as are in use in other parts of Switzergirlhood, which whispers to her in dreams land, would easily do the work. But the the joy that is to come. Of this ideal Bernese is very conservative in his ways, loveliness, which even Homer has placed and I suspect, moreover, that every one in a fairyland beyond the reach of human who has grain to thresh is very glad of fear and sorrow, the outward and visible being able to make such a clatter about form remained in the works of plastic art; it. Most of the houses have some square it lived again and lives for us in the maid-yards - seldom a rod or two-of garens of the panathenaic procession; but den ground, in which they grow fine, and the inward spirit died out, never to revive. sometimes splendid, crops of potatoes, Women bearing themselves nobly in mo- cabbages, lettuces, celery, kidney-beans, ments of supreme trial, like Antigone and and scarlet-runners, beet, with now and Electra, women amiable and gentle like then a few flowers, and almost invariably Ismene, the later Greeks knew how to a fruit-tree or two-plum, pear, or apple depict; they sympathized with the affec-trees- -the fruit of which hangs over the tionate tenderness of Dejanira and the road without tempting Continental hondevotion of Alcestis. It was more diffi- esty. The main fertilizer is liquid macult for them to conceive a delicate and nure, and it would astonish an English responsive nature living in the lap of market-gardener to see how the ground pleasure yet simple and natural as a flower is drenched with it. It is applied in the of the field, a maiden speaking freely to a most primitive manner. An old man or man without boldness, a woman neither an old woman is seen crawling up-hill ignorant nor finding evil on the tree of with a V-shaped receptacle - only with knowledge. the point flattened-strapped on his or her back, like a French rag-gatherer's hotte, made of wood, and containing the precious liquid (the drinking-water is brought up in the same manner, and one only fervently hopes that the same receptacles are not used for both). Arrived at his destination, the bearer, without unstrapping his burthen, by a peculiar movement of the shoulder gently tilts over the contents into a half-barrel or large pail, provided by the cultivator, who in turn, by means of a scoop holding perhaps a quart or two, fixed at the end of a long handle, which he dips into the larger pail, soaks his vegetables at the root with the manure. (I am using the masculine, but the cultivator is, as often as not, a woman.)

From The Spectator.

LIFE IN A BERNESE VILLAGE.

Oberhofen, LAKE OF THUN, August 31st. I AM within forty minutes' walk or twenty minutes' steam of busy Thun, and yet in the midst of genuine Swiss village life; there is a telegraph office and a postoffice, and of course a large schoolhouse; there are several pensions — one calling itself also a restaurant― besides a second-rate hotel; there are various tradesmen, though scarcely more than five or six who have anything to be called a shop; but most of them are half peasants, and the life, except at the pensions or hotel, is thoroughly peasant life. At five all is astir (I have been woke at three by a man going forth, staff in hand, on some longer journey); by nine at night, scarcely a window is lighted. The houses are the ordinary wooden houses of the canton, with outside galleries, and generally outside staircases. Every fifth house in the village seems to have a barn where threshing is carried on, and by six in the morning the air resounds with the rhyth mic beat of the flails. —as great a nui

A quiet people, civil, and amongst themselves gossipy. During ten days' stay, I have only on one occasion heard angry words, and the only noises virtually are those of labor or nature. There is a pig, for instance, who informs one of all his meals beforehand by his outcries of impatience. At such times, I can see his snout in profile projected out of his stye, and bobbing from side to side. When his mistress finally makes her appearance with a pail of wash, his eagerness becomes ungovernable, and he

puts his two front paws upon the door, | informed that when, two or three years and pokes out his whole head, invaria- ago, owing to the failure of the potato bly receiving a good pat upon it, and crop on the other side of the lake, distress then subsiding into his food. There is amounting almost to famine prevailed, a cow, who is taken to pasture, while her and a subscription was got up to provide stall companion, apparently a sheep, is the schoolchildren, through their schoolleft behind; and the noise which these masters, with a draught of milk at school, two make on her return in the evening, it proved so unwonted a diet that they as the cow approaches home, the sheep could not digest it. Our own laborers, no bleating to the cow, and the cow mooing doubt, often do not get nearly enough for to the sheep, is prodigious. Then there their children of this precious element of is a forge, from which rings forth pretty nutrition, but I doubt if the absence of it constantly the clink of metal; and the from their dietary is so complete as it is winter stores of wood are being brought with the Swiss children. The almost enin on all sides, and often chopped or tire dependence of the Bernese upon sawn into smaller lengths or thicknesses. agriculture (beyond some wood-carving, in A crow or two- -rooks they cannot be which itself they complain of being cut croak occasionally overhead; whilst at out by foreigners), is said to be the main stated intervals the bells which announce cause of this state of things. Certainly, the arrival and departure of the lake the men hereabouts are loutish, comsteamers mark the great events of the pared, for instance, with the bright Apday to the village at large, and the bells penzellers. of the pensions announcing meals, the greatest in life, perhaps, to some at least of the idlers from all countries who are there gathered,-Americans, Germans, English, French, Spaniards, etc.

Oberhofen is, indeed, a favorable specimen of Bernese life, partly owing to its neighborhood to Thun, and to the many gentlemen's campagnes scattered about, to say nothing of the expenditure of the pensions, but perhaps chiefly to its favorable position on the northern slopes of the lovely lake, fronting a few points west of south, and thereby favorably situated for vine-growing. There is, accordingly, a large acreage laid out in vineyards (which promise this year an abundant crop), and though the wine made here is said to be very poor itself, it is used for mixing, and vineyards yield in fair years six per cent. Whether the dreaded phylloxera, which has already made great havoc in some parts of Switzerland, will reach this part of the country, remains yet to be seen. Yet the people are not only, like most of their countrymen, hard-featured, but seldom really healthy-looking; and public attention has recently been directed to the increasing number of young men from Canton Berne who are found physically unfit for military service. It is said that the chief cause of this is the virtually total withholding of milk from the children after they are weaned, in order that it may all be sent to the cheese-dairies, and their being brought up almost exclusively on potatoes, with too often a zest of potato brandy, said to be itself nearly as poisonous as absinthe. I have even been

Yet, when the worst is said, there is much which our Hodge might envy in the lot of these Bernese. Almost every family has its own homestead, its own bit of land-pasture or vineyard, or arable or garden, often several, or all of the fourand no labor is lost which they bestow upon it. Accordingly, industry is universal, though its methods may often be primitive. I saw the other day what would have made a choice subject for a painter, - a little, white-haired thing of about three, sitting on the roadside beside her sister, asleep, with her head on the latter's knee; and the elder one, who could hardly have been seven, knitting industriously over the little head. Both were comfortably dressed, perfectly clean, and rather better-favored than one mostly sees. Although only within some miles' distance of the mendicant Oberland, I have been begged to only by one old woman. And with industry, honesty goes hand in hand. I have spoken of the fruittrees overhanging the streets. The vineyards, too, are all open. (What would not a cherry-grower, or cobnut-grower of Kent, who has to pay so highly for the watching of his crops, say to such a state of things?) The fencing of the gardens is almost ludicrous. That of one opposite my window consists, on one side for a long stretch, of a few poles and a clothesline, strengthened in part by a grass edging, and wherever there is anything more a boy of twelve could throw his leg over it. You may see on all sides quantities of broken paling, but always from mere decay; I have not seen one stake that could have been broken or wrenched out by

dishonest hands, as is so perpetually be- | outside of eating and drinking, until he is
ing done in England. And below is the deprived of it. Take that one point of the
lake, with its beautiful, clear water; and beauty of wild-flowers. Foreigners ex-
in front the green and grandly-shaped cepted, I have not seen a single wild-
Niesen, and the quaintly jagged ridges flower in the hands or on the person of
that run up to it from the west; and to man, woman, or child. If I could waft
the east shines out, when the air is clear, here by the touch of an enchanter's wand
the silver of the snow-mountains; and an Andalusian child of the lowest condi-
the slopes behind are crowned with tion, a woman, a muleteer, they would
woods, now of pines, now of deciduous pluck such flowers as abound here by
trees, through which tumble down many a handfuls. You would see them in every
thread of clear water, that is a torrent in woman's bosom, in every man's hat, on
spring; and the verdure is of the richest every child's neck. The Bernese will
emerald, and the wild-flowers are abun- never wake up to the sense of their beauty
dantly varied and beautiful. No wonder till he is far away, pent up in some dusty
the Bernese peasant loves his home, city; and then, perhaps, will also flash
even though his lot may be a hardish one upon him for the first time, as a thing of
at times.
beauty, and not only as a mere expanse of
water, the blue lake, in its setting of green
hills and mountains, and the reflections
of the trees and hedges of the opposite
shore quivering on its mirror.

Not, indeed, probably, that he knows why he loves it, though he might find out, if he were away from it. Your Teuton, unless highly cultured, seldom understands, or savors his own enjoyment,

L.

HOW TO AVOID SUNSTROKE. - The truth is suggest a pleasant sort of lotus-eating dream that the best way of fighting the heat is by of wood and field. Each thoroughfare has its avoiding it. If we wish to escape sunstroke, shady side, and, instead of the repulsive Loneven in its mitigated form of languor, lassi-don "public," one comes at every few hundred tude, and drowsiness, we must keep ourselves yards across some little café, with its awning cool; and to do this as it ought to be done we drawn over the pavement, and with chairs and must take precautions against the heat before marble tables, where the thirsty soul who deit bursts upon us. Those who wish to know mands of the garçon even a cup of cold water how this can best be effected have only to pay and tenders for it his three halfpence will rea short visit to Paris during the sultriest weeks ceive a courteous welcome. As for the French of August. As soon as the weather demands "drinks" cups that, unlike the English the change a Frenchman apparels himself in ". "peg" of "soda and brandy,' ""cool but not low shoes and trousers of "duck," or nankeen; inebriate" their praises cannot be too loudly his shirt collar expands; his necktie dwindles sung or too widely spread. In but few Ento an apology; waistcoat he altogether dis-glish households is the nature of "orgeat" cards; his coat is of thin alpaca, or the lightest Tuscore silk; his hat of white felt or straw; nor is he ashamed to boldly carry an umbrella. His house, especially if it be on the sunny side of the street, is regulated with equal care and forethought. The carpets are taken up; the heavy jalousies are shut before sunrise, and closed through the day; the court-yard is hourly watered; and in households where small expenses are matter of little moment, a large bowl of ice and water, or a pyramid of solid ice, surrounded by flowers, forms the centre ornament of the table. What the individual citizen does for himself, the municipality of Paris does for the entire city. Long before the Parisians are astir the streets have been well watered with a hose, and the trottoir thoroughly washed down. Along the Boulevards, and in most of the principal avenues, large trees gratefully cool the atmosphere, and

known, or the true use of raspberry vinegar understood; in but few English hotels is the carafe put upon the table, its contents a solidly frozen mass of crystal. Indeed, of life in hot weather, as of life at the seaside and of divers other matters in which personal comfort is the chief consideration, we cannot but admit, however reluctantly, that "they manage these things better in France and in the Colonies." The reason, perhaps, is not so much that we are less careful of comfort than our neighbors, as that we are governed more by commercial instinct. Serious provision against summer involves considerable outlay, and in a climate where we know not what a day may bring forth, people do not believe in a summer till they see it, and by the time they have taken two or three days to make sure of it, it may very possibly have come to an end.

Hatters' Gazette.

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