mockingly, its long, lank finger, and scornfully, as to a victim not worth the wooing. Suffocated in the thick, hot air, the sun smites you, and its keen arrows dart upward, keener, from the ground. The drear silence, like a voice in Nightmare, whispers “You dared to tempt me;" and 5 with fresh fury of shining, and a more stifling heat, the horrors of the mid-desert encompass you.

But in the midst of your weariness and despair, more alluring than the mirage of cool lakes and green valleys to the eye of the dying Bedoueen, a voice of running water 10 sings through your memory,—the sound of streams gurgling under the village bridge at evening, and the laughter of boys bathing there,-yourself a boy, yourself plunging in the deep, dark coolness, and so, weary and fevered in the desert of Arabia, you are overflowed by the memory of 15 your youth, and to you, as to Khadra, the sun has been Mandragora and you are sleeping.

You cannot tell how long you sleep and doze. You fancy, when your eyes at length open, that you are more deeply dreaming.

20

For the pomp of a wintry landscape dazzles your awaking. The sweeps and drifts of the sand hills among which you are winding, have the sculpturesque grace of snow. They descend in strange corrugations to a long level lake— a reach of water frozen into transparent blue ice, streaked 25 with the white sifted snow that has overblown it. The seeming lake is circled with low, melancholy hills. They are bare, like the rock-setting of solitary mountain tarns. The death of wintry silence broods over the whole, but the sky is cloudless, and the sun sits supreme over the miracu- 30 lous landscape. Vainly you rally your thoughts, and smile at the perfect mirage. Its lines do not melt in your smiles, and the spectacle becomes more solemn in the degree that you 8-17: b, i, h. 18-20: b. 21-22-23, 26-28, 29-31-32: b. 21-154, 3: s, n.

are conscious of the delusion. Never, upon its eternal Alpine throne, never, through the brief, brilliant days of New England December, was winter more evident and entire.

And when you hear behind you, sole sound in the desert, 5 the shrill tenor of the Armenian's camel-driver, chanting in monotonous refrain songs whose meaning you can only imagine, because Khadra draws aside the curtains to listen, and because you have seen that the tall, swarthy Syrian is enamored of Khadra,-then it is not Arabia, nor Switzer10 land, nor New England, but a wintry glade of Lapland, and a solitary singing to his reindeer.

This is not a dream, nor has leering Fever touched you with his finger, but it is a mystery of the desert. You have eaten an apple of the Hesperides. For the Bedoueen poets 15 have not alone the shifting cloud-scenery to garnish their romances, but thus, unconsciously to them, the forms of another landscape and of another life than theirs, are marshaled before their eyes, and their minds are touched with the beauty of an unknown experience.

20 In this variety of aspect, in endless calm, the desert surpasses the sea. It is seldom an unbroken level, and from the quantity of its atmosphere, slight objects are magnified, and a range of mounds will often mask as a group of goodly hills. Even in the most interrupted reaches, the horizon is 25 rarely a firm line, but the mirage breaks it, so that the edge of the landscape is always quivering and uncertain.

Pleasant, after the wild romance of such a desert day— romance, which the sun in setting, closes to reach the camping-ground, to gurgle in MacWhirter's ear with the 30 guttural harshness that he understands as the welcome signal of rest, and to feel him, not without a growl of illhumor, quaking and rolling beneath you, and finally, with a half sudden start, sinking to the ground.

12-19: e. 27-33: i.

You tie his bent fore-knee together, with the halter which goes around his head; and you turn to see that the tent is not spread over stones, which would not stuff your pillow softly. Then, returning, you observe that MacWhirter with his foreleg still bent and bound to his head, is limping 5 upon the three serviceable legs to browse upon chance shrubs, and to assert his total independence of you, and contempt of your precautions.

Meanwhile, Khadra steps out of her palanquin, and while her father's camp is pitched, she shakes out the silken full- 10 ness of her shintyan, and strolls off upon the desert. The old Armenian slips the pad from the back of his white mare, for he does not ride in a saddle, and stands in everybody's way, in his long, blue broadcloth kaftan, taking huge pinches of snuff.

The Commander, relieved of his arsenal, bustles among our Arabs, swearing at them lustily whenever he approaches the Howadji, apparently convinced that everything is going well, so long as he makes noise enough.

15

"Therein not peculiar," murmurs the Pacha, rolled up 20 in his huge woolen capote, and smoking a contemplative chibouque.

The tents are pitched, the smoke curls to the sky, and the howling wilderness is tamed by the domestic preparations of getting tea.

25

The sun also is tamed, our great romancer, our fervent poet, our glorious Painter, who has made the day a poem and a picture, who has peopled memory with sweet and sad imagery, who, like Jesus, brought a sword, yet like him has given us rest. He, too, is tamed, and his fervor is failing. 30 Yet as he retires through the splendor of the vapory architecture in the West, he looks at us once more like a king from his palace windows.

9-15 h. 16-25: w. 26-33: c, e.`

6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14.

་

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

1850-1894

THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS

"Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or not, I am sure it is so in States to honor them."-SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.

THERE is one story of the wars of Rome which I have always very much envied for England. Germanicus was going down at the head of the legions into a dangerous river—on the opposite bank the woods were full of Ger5 mans-when there flew out seven great eagles which seemed to marshal the Romans on their way; they did not pause or waver, but disappeared into the forest where the enemy lay concealed. "Forward!" cried Germanicus with a fine rhetorical inspiration, "Forward! and follow the 10 Roman birds." It would be a very heavy spirit that did not give a leap at such a signal, and a very timorous one that continued to have any doubt of success. To appropriate the eagles as fellow countrymen was to make imaginary allies of the forces of nature; the Roman Empire and its 15 military fortunes, and along with these the prospects of those individual Roman legionaries now fording a river in Germany, looked altogether greater and more hopeful. It is a kind of illusion easy to produce. A particular shape of cloud, the appearance of a particular star, the holiday of 20 some particular saint, anything in short to remind the combatants of patriotic legends or old successes, may be

10-157, 3: c, q, n.

enough to change the issue of a pitched battle; for it gives to the one party a feeling that Right and the larger interests are with him.

If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must be about the sea. The lion is nothing to us; he has not 5 been taken to the hearts of the people, and naturalized as an English emblem. We know right well that a lion would fall foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian Jew, and we do not carry him before us in the smoke of battle. But the sea is our approach and bulwark; 10 it has been the scene of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in lyrical strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating experiences of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable side to English prepossessions. A man from Bedfordshire, who 15 does not know one end of the ship from the other until she begins to move, swaggers among such persons with a sense of hereditary nautical experience. To suppose yourself endowed with natural parts for the sea because you are the countryman of Blake and mighty Nelson, is per- 20 haps just as unwarrantable as to imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient guarantee that you will look well in a kilt. But the feeling is there, and seated beyond the reach of argument. We should consider ourselves unworthy of our descent if we did not share the arrogance of our pro- 25 genitors, and please ourselves with the pretension that the sea is English. Even where it is looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we regard it as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers take their rest until the last trumpet; for I suppose no other 30 nation has lost as many ships, or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.

There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the 4-22: a, j. 22-32: n. 33-158, 10: m.