swirling surface, never more to
be seen upon the face of the sea.

For in that year a great cloud hung for seventeen days over the African
coast, a deep black cloud which was the dark shroud of the burning city.
And when the seventeen days were over, Roman ploughs were driven from
end to end of the charred ashes, and salt was scattered there as a sign
that Carthage should be no more. And far off a huddle of naked, starving
folk stood upon the distant mountains, and looked down upon the desolate
plain which had once been the fairest and richest upon earth. And they
understood too late that it is the law of heaven that the world is given
to the hardy and to the self-denying, whilst he who would escape the
duties of manhood will soon be stripped of the pride, the wealth, and
the power, which are the prizes which manhood brings.

III

THROUGH THE VEIL

He was a great shock-headed, freckle-faced Borderer, the lineal
descendant of a cattle-thieving clan in Liddesdale. In spite of his
ancestry he was as solid and sober a citizen as one would wish to see, a
town councillor of Melrose, an elder of the Church, and the chairman of
the local branch of the Young Men's Christian Association. Brown was his
name--and you saw it printed up as "Brown and Handiside" over the great
grocery stores in the High Street. His wife, Maggie Brown, was an
Armstrong before her marriage, and came from an old farming stock in the
wilds of Teviothead. She was small, swarthy, and dark-eyed, with a
strangely nervous temperament for a Scotch woman. No greater contrast
could be found than the big tawny man and the dark little woman, but
both were of the soil as far back as any memory could extend.

One day--it was the first anniversary of their wedding--they had driven
over together to see the excavations of the Roman Fort at Newstead. It
was not a particularly picturesque spot. From the northern bank of the
Tweed, just where the river forms a loop, there extends a gentle slope
of arable land. Across it run the trenches of the excavators, with here
and there an exposure of old stonework to show the foundations of the
ancient walls. It had been a huge place, for the camp was fifty acres in
extent, and the fort fifteen. However, it was all made easy for them
since Mr. Brown knew the farmer to whom the land belonged. Under his
guidance they spent a long summer evening inspecting the trenches, the
pits, the ramparts, and all the strange variety o