s, and
interfering with the sacred rights of mourners to passionately bewail
the dead in the Asiatic manner; the same number being enriched with
contributions from two rising poets,--a lyric of love by Sappho, and an
ode sent by Anacreon from Teos, with an editorial note explaining that
the Maces was not responsible for the sentiments of the poem.

But, in fact, the gentleman who sat before the backlog in his
winter-house had other things to think of. For Nebuchadnezzar was coming
that way with the chariots and horses of Babylon and a great crowd of
marauders; and the king had not even the poor choice whether he would
be the vassal of the Chaldean or of the Egyptian. To us, this is only
a ghostly show of monarchs and conquerors stalking across vast historic
spaces. It was no doubt a vulgar enough scene of war and plunder. The
great captains of that age went about to harry each other's territories
and spoil each other's cities very much as we do nowadays, and for
similar reasons;--Napoleon the Great in Moscow, Napoleon the Small in
Italy, Kaiser William in Paris, Great Scott in Mexico! Men have not
changed much;--The Fire-Tender sat in his winter-garden in the third
month; there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. He cut
the leaves of "Scribner's Monthly" with his penknife, and thought of
Jehoiakim.

That seems as real as the other. In the garden, which is a room of the
house, the tall callas, rooted in the ground, stand about the fountain;
the sun, streaming through the glass, illumines the many-hued flowers. I
wonder what Jehoiakim did with the mealy-bug on his passion-vine, and
if he had any way of removing the scale-bug from his African acacia? One
would like to know, too, how he treated the red spider on the Le Marque
rose. The record is silent. I do not doubt he had all these insects in
his winter-garden, and the aphidae besides; and he could not smoke them
out with tobacco, for the world had not yet fallen into its second stage
of the knowledge of good and evil by eating the forbidden tobacco-plant.

I confess that this little picture of a fire on the hearth so many
centuries ago helps to make real and interesting to me that somewhat
misty past. No doubt the lotus and the acanthus from the Nile grew in
that winter-house, and perhaps Jehoiakim attempted--the most difficult
thing in the world the cultivation of the wild flowers from Lebanon.
Perhaps Jehoiakim was interested also, as I am through this anci