off again from every obstacle. So must
have ineffectually swung, so resented their inefficiency, those light
crowds that followed the {175} Star of Hades, and uttered exiguous voices
in the land beyond Cocytus.

There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely
wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It is bitter to return to
infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your
feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied
to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes
and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown
so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these
reasons--although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my
surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on
the fish that darted here and there about me, swift as humming-birds--yet
I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back to
the ladder and signed to me to mount. And there was one more experience
before me even then. Of a sudden, my ascending head passed into the
trough of a swell. Out of the green, I shot at once into a glory of
rosy, almost of sanguine light--the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the
heaven above a vault of crimson. And then the glory faded into the hard,
ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a grey sea, and a
whistling wind.

(_Across the Plains_.)

{178}

NOTES

Page

1 Sir Mordred, left in charge of the kingdom during King Arthur's
absence oversea, treacherously raised a rebellion and made war on the
king when he returned. It was in this war that Arthur presently met
his end.

5 The grants to which the Queen refers are the trade-monopolies
granted by her, which she now proceeded to abolish.

8 This account of Cleopatra's death (from North's translation of
Plutarch's _Life of Antony_) is closely followed by Shakespeare in
_Antony and Cleopatra_.

11 The basket of figs contained the asp, from the bite of which
Cleopatra died (_Antony and Cleopatra_, act V. scene ii.).

12 _The three first monarchies of the world_: these, according to
Ralegh's account of the world's history, are those of Assyria, Egypt,
and Persia.

13 _The good advice of Cineas_: when Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was
contemplating the invasion of Italy (B.C. 280) his friend and adviser
Cineas asked him what he would do when he was master of th