d concluded its show did the audience go away contented.

ORTIGIA

CHAPTER XXII
O FOUNTAIN ARETHUSE

When "Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian
mountains" she had scarcely reached the age at which women begin to dream
of love. She spied the approaching river-god Alpheus and, to preserve
what was dearer to her than life, for she was a nymph of Diana, plunged
heroically into the earth. Alpheus, who had reached the age when men
desire to act, plunged in after her. They flowed along inside the ground
and under the sea, he following her, all the way from Greece to Sicily
and, according to the recognised habit of gods and demi-gods believed to
be dead and buried, they rose again. The place of Arethusa's
resurrection is the island of Ortigia, but, although I have the story
from the fountain head, it all happened so long ago that I have not been
able to ascertain whether Alpheus rose there or at a spot on the mainland
of Sicily nearer Etna where S. Alfio is the patron saint, and although
the "e" in Alpheus takes the stress and the "i" in Alfio does not,
nevertheless, the custode of the spring, who was himself my informant,
may confuse the two names. The difference between the versions is that
between tragedy and comedy. If they, the pursued and her pursuer, rose
in the same place it can hardly be that he did not catch her. If he rose
somewhere else, then she may still preserve her everlasting virginity and
they will neither of them ever reach the age when experience teaches both
men and women to regret. She will be ever flying, he ever pursuing, like
the maiden and the lover on that Grecian Urn which an eminent authority,
baffled in his attempts at identification, thinks was "probably imagined"
by Keats.

I possess a Bible and Prayer-book bound together in one volume which was
given me on leaving Rottingdean by my sincere friend, the master of the
preparatory school there. It contains, just before the First Chapter of
Genesis, a Chronological Map "with remarkable persons and events
collaterally placed." I remember how I used to mitigate the tedium of
divine service by reading to myself that the creation of the world
occupied one of the weeks of the year 4004 B.C.; that Egypt was founded
about 2190 B.C.; that Troy fell about 1180 B.C., seventy years or so
before the birth of King David; and that Homer and Elijah flourished
contemporaneously between 1000 and 900 B.C. My schoolmaster