the high platform, where eyes, all those long centuries ago, must
have looked out even as his, across the lovely land.

Was it as lovely then?... Could it have been less so?...

How the quiet beauty soothed and caressed him! Surely there were
moments when the wilderness, tamed at last, like a lovely, wayward
mistress become entrancingly docile, fondles the hand, and ravishes
the senses of the strong man who conquered it.

Is this one of the rich rewards Life holds in the palm of her hand for
the path-finders?... This glorious sense of ownership. This winsome
soothing of shy gratitude when the fierce first resistance to conquest
is overpast. A man may call England his country because he was born
there, and his father before him; but, perhaps, after all, that is a
small thing compared to standing upon a high eminence, and looking
across a quiet world which is your country because of all you yourself
have given to it of hope and faith and steadfast purpose.

In some such spirit soothing came to the quiet man on the top of the
Acropolis Hill, whispering to him that, after all, this was _his_
country, and if the beloved dead did indeed seem so far away in fact,
in spirit he was perhaps nearer to his Empire-builders than he had
ever been before.

He turned his head at last, and his eyes rested upon the circular
wall, four hundred feet below, that enclosed the temple ruins. Then
for a moment a wave of depression swept over him, blotting out the
landscape loveliness. Was it all, then, vanity, this building and
striving?... The making of walls and fortifications for another race,
centuries afterwards, to look upon with cold wonder and curiosity?
Three thousand years ago perhaps another man had stood even there and
mourned his king that was dead. And so soon ... so soon ... he also
died, and the massive walls became ruins, and the dynasty, or empire,
or era, passed away into oblivion. How soon might a similar fate
overtake his own great Empire!... and the beloved King, Edward the
Peacemaker, be perhaps but a legend to some strange new race.

And then it was as though the land to which he had given so much rose
up to give in her turn the might of hope and renewing. His eyes
wandered again to the distant mountains and over the fertile plain
lying between, and all the outspread richness called to him that at
least there was no ruin here, no hopelessness, no decay.

Progress spoke to him from the rolling plains and from the m