se of his
fellow-men, carried out entirely at his own cost. But Howard would not
listen to them for one moment.

'The execution of your design would be a cruel punishment to me,' he
says in a letter to the subscribers. 'I shall always think the reform
now going on in several of the gaols of this kingdom, which I hope will
become general, the greatest honour and most ample reward I can possibly
receive.'

It was Howard who was right, and his friends who were wrong, for though
after his death they would no longer be denied, it is not the picture of
the statue in St. Paul's which rises before us at the name of John
Howard, but that of the prison cell.

HANNIBAL

If we could go back more than three thousand years, and be present at
one of the banquets of Egypt or of the great kingdoms of the East, we
should be struck by the wonderful colour which blazed in some of the
hangings on the walls, and in the dresses of the guests; and if,
coveting the same beautiful colour for our own homes, we asked where it
came from, the answer would be that it was the famous Tyrian purple,
made at the prosperous town of Tyre, off the coast of Palestine,
inhabited by the Phoenician race.

* * * * *

The Phoenicians were celebrated traders and sent their goods all over
the world. Ships took them to the mouth of the Nile, to the islands in
the Cornish sea, to the flourishing cities of Crete almost as civilised
as our own; while caravans of camels bore Phoenician wares across the
desert to the Euphrates and the Tigris, most likely even to India
itself. Soon the Phoenicians began to plant colonies which, like Tyre
their mother, grew rich and beautiful, and far along the north African
coast--so runs the old story--the lady Dido founded the city of
Carthage, whose marble temples, theatres, and places of assembly were by
and by to vie with those of Tyre itself.

But before these were yet completed, a wanderer, tall and strong and
sun-burned, towering nearly a head over the small Phoenician people,
landed on the coast and was brought before the queen, as Dido was now
called.

His name, he said, was AEneas, and he had spent many years in fighting
before the walls of Troy for the sake of Helen, whom he thought the
loveliest woman in the world, till he had looked on Dido the queen.
After the war was ended he had travelled westwards, and truly strange
were the scenes on which his eyes had rested since he ha