I been able to talk, I would have stopped longer.
There was a sudden friendship sprung up between me and that poor
unlettered infant of the desert.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE RUINS AGAIN.

Great Extent of the Ancient City.--Marsa, on the
Sea-shore.--Carthaginian Catacombs near Camatte.--Quail
Shooting.--Trait of Honesty in the Arabs.--The Arab
Character.--Anecdotes concerning them.

The second time I went to the ruins I went, like Scipio, to weep, not
over Carthage, but the loss of my breakfast; and the more so that
it was to have been a very good one--a regular pic-nic, or _fete
champetre_--under olive-trees, or orange-trees, or palms, shaded
from the scorching rays of Phoebus. Champagne, Burgundy (my
favourite wine), were to crown the repast. Nor was the food to be
only corporal, but eke mental, as the great explorer--the great
excavator--was to be there, to have explained that this was a
theatre, that an aqueduct; the god to whom this temple or that
altar was dedicated; and how many four-in-hands, driven by fast
young Phoenician guardsmen, would have been able to pass each other
down that "_via longa_." How many stones made up that house; and that
this was a bath, and not a harem; and that a certain statue of some
celebrity--whose name I had never heard, and never shall--was, by
some, supposed to lie 100 feet under this marble pillar, though,
according to others, he might be 102 feet deep interred--for all of
which, I daresay, I should have been the wiser and the better; but I
was sufficiently mundane to regret my _dejeuner_ the most. The fact
is, A----, whose back was not sufficiently recovered to accompany me
riding, and the American Consul and Davies, had gone with the edibles
and beverages in a carriage, and were to have met me at the temple
of some god. But, unfortunately, I mistook the deity's name, and
afterwards found that their shrine lay ten miles off from the one I
worshipped at. This will give one a good idea of the vastness of
the ancient city, and struck me more than all the lectures and
description in the world. Where people were crowded like bees, as
in our London, buying and selling, and riding and driving, some 2,000
years past--occupied then, as now, in all the frivolities of this
empty world--to find a complete solitude--a desert nearly--where
wander the jackal and hyena! A very clever people, no doubt, these
same Phoenicians were, to judge by their edifices; yet they had not
discov