where once all Egypt came down the flood of glowing Nile,
and Herodotus mused under the shadowy foliage, looking on the lake-like
rings of water. The Temple of the Sun, where the beauty of Asenath
beguiled the Israelite to forget his sale into bondage and banishment,
lies in shapeless hillocks, over which canter the mules of dragomen and
chatter the tongues of tourists. Where the Lutetian Palace of Julian
saluted their darling as Augustus, the sledge-hammer and the stucco of
the Haussmann fiat bear desolation in their wake. Levantine dice
are rattled where Hypatia's voice was heard. Bills of exchange are
trafficked in where Cleopatra wandered under the palm aisles of her rose
gardens. Drummers roll their caserne-calls where Drusus fell and Sulla
laid down dominion.

And here--in the land of Hannibal, in the conquest of Scipio, in the
Phoenicia whose loveliness used to flash in the burning, sea-mirrored
sun, while her fleets went eastward and westward for the honey of Athens
and the gold of Spain--here Cigarette danced the cancan!

A little hostelry of the barriere swung its sign of the As de Pique
where feathery palms once had waved above mosques of snowy gleam,
with marble domes and jeweled arabesques, and the hush of prayer under
columned aisles. "Here are sold wine, liquor and tobacco," was written
where once verses of the Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands along
porphyry cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared its
impudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, Phoenician
warriors had watched the galleys of the gold-haired favorite of the gods
bear down to smite her against whom the one unpardonable sin of rivalry
to Rome was quoted.

The riot of a Paris guinguette was heard where once the tent of
Belisarius might have been spread above the majestic head that towered
in youth above the tempestuous seas of Gothic armies, as when, silvered
with age, it rose as a rock against the on-sweeping flood of Bulgarian
hordes. The grisette charms of little tobacconists, milliners,
flower-girls, lemonade-sellers, bonbon-sellers, and filles de joie
flaunted themselves in the gaslight where the lustrous sorceress eyes
of Antonina might have glanced over the Afric Sea, while her wanton's
heart, so strangely filled with leonine courage and shameless license,
heroism and brutality, cruelty and self-devotion, swelled under the
purples of her delicate vest, at the glory of the man she at once
di