PREFACE. Our knowledge of the present and past fauna of Europe is as yet insufficient to indicate with precision the original homes of its component elements, but I hope that the lines of research laid down here, and the method of treatment adopted, will aid zoologists and geologists in collecting materials for a more comprehensive study of the history of our animals. I trust also that a fresh impulse... more...

Chapter I: The Birth of Columbine ALL day long over the gray Islington Street October, casting pearly mists, had turned the sun to silver and made London a city of meditation whose tumbled roofs and parapets and glancing spires appeared hushed and translucent as in a lake's tranquillity. The traffic, muted by the glory of a fine autumn day, marched, it seemed, more slowly and to a sound of heavier... more...

THE CITY AND THE WORLD   FATHER DENFILI, old and blind, telling his beads in the corner of the cloister garden, sighed. Father Tomasso, who had brought him from his confessional in the great church to the bench where day after day he kept his sightless vigil over the pond of the goldfish, turned back at the sound, then, seeing the peace of Father Denfili's face, thought he must have fancied the... more...

PERIPLUS OF HANNO THE CARTHAGINIAN. I am not sufficiently Quixotic to attempt a defence of the Carthaginians on the western coast of Africa, or any where else, but I submit that the accusation brought against them by Mr. S. Bannister, formerly Attorney-General of New South Wales, is not sustained by the only record we possess of Hanno's colonising expedition. That gentleman, in his learned Records... more...

PREFACE. This work has already appeared in Graham's Magazine, under the title of "Rose Budd." The change of name is solely the act of the author, and arises from a conviction that the appellation given in this publication is more appropriate than the one laid aside. The necessity of writing to a name, instead of getting it from the incidents of the book itself, has been the cause of this... more...

CHAPTER I. Nearly a half mile out from the rugged Sabine mountains, standing clear from them, and directly in front of the sinuous little valley which the northernmost headstream of the Trerus made for itself, rises a conspicuous and commanding mountain, two thousand three hundred and eighteen feet above the level of the sea, and something more than half that height above the plain below. This... more...

The Massacre of Colleagues The existence of war in the modern world is primarily a question for the moral philosopher. It may be of interest to the anthropologist to consider war as a gallant survival with an impressive ritual and a code of honour curiously detached from the social environment, like the Hindu suttee; or with a procedure euphemistically disguised, like some chthonic liturgy of ancient... more...

CHAPTER I. Subiaco lies beyond Tivoli, southeast from Rome, at the upper end of a wild gorge in the Samnite mountains. It is an archbishopric, and gives a title to a cardinal, which alone would make it a town of importance. It shares with Monte Cassino the honour of having been chosen by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica, his sister, as the site of a monastery and a convent; and in a cell in the... more...

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BIRMINGHAM. It is a fine autumnal morning in the year 1837. I am sitting on the box seat of a stage coach, in the yard of the Bull-and-Mouth, St. Martin's-le-Grand, in the City of London. The splendid gray horses seem anxious to be off, but their heads are held by careful grooms. The metal fittings of the harness glitter in the early sunlight. Jew pedlar-boys offer me razors... more...

TIME AND THE GODS Once when the gods were young and only Their swarthy servant Time was without age, the gods lay sleeping by a broad river upon earth. There in a valley that from all the earth the gods had set apart for Their repose the gods dreamed marble dreams. And with domes and pinnacles the dreams arose and stood up proudly between the river and the sky, all shimmering white to the morning. In... more...