in, was on the
point of publicly confirming popular opinion by declaring he was
suffering from suicidal mono-mania of a novel kind. Luckily an
archaeologist protested and showed by actual documents that this
phenomenon, which had become so unusual but was frequent in past ages
under the name of bravery, was a simple case of ancestral reversion
sufficiently serious to merit examination. As luck would have it, the
unfortunate Miltiades had been wounded in the face in the same
encounter; and the scar which all the art of the best surgeons never
succeeded in removing, drew down upon him the annoying and almost
insulting nick-name of "scarred face". It may be readily understood how
from this time forward, soured by the consciousness of his partial
disfigurement, as the ancient bard Byron had formerly been for a nearly
similar reason, he avoided appearing in public, and thereby giving the
crowd an opportunity of pointing the finger of scorn at the visible
traces of his former attack of madness. He was never seen again till the
day when, his vessel being hemmed in by the icebergs of the Gulf Stream,
he was obliged with his companions to finish the crossing on foot over
the solidly frozen Atlantic.

In the middle of the central state shelter, a huge vaulted hall with
walls ten yards thick, without windows, surrounded with a hundred
gigantic furnaces, and perpetually lit up by their hundred flaming maws,
Miltiades one day appeared. The remnant of the flower of humanity, of
both sexes, splendid even in its misery, was huddled together there.
They did not consist of the great men of science with their bald pates,
nor even the great actresses, nor the great writers, whose inspiration
had deserted them, nor the consequential ones now past their prime, nor
of prim old ladies--broncho-pneumonia, alas! had made a clean sweep of
them all at the very first frost--but the enthusiastic heirs of their
traditions, their secrets, and also of their vacant chairs, that is to
say, their pupils, full of talent and promise. Not a single university
professor was there, but a crowd of deputies and assistants; not a
single minister, but a crowd of young secretaries of state. Not a single
mother of a family, but a bevy of artists' models, admirably formed, and
inured against the cold by the practice of posing for the nude; above
all, a number of fashionable beauties, who had been likewise saved by
the excellent hygienic effect of daily wearing low dr