a son of his, hast not heard of Cato and 10 banks, and cometh swiftly - that is all I Brutus. They were very great men, and never as great as in death. In their dying, they left this law-A Roman may not survive his good-fortune. Art thou listening?'

'A Roman in triumph would have out many flags. She must be an enemy. Hear now,' said Arrius, becoming grave 15 again, hear, while yet I may speak. If the galley be a pirate, thy life is safe; they may not give thee freedom; they may put thee to the oar again; but they will not kill thee. On the other hand, I —' The tribune faltered.

He tossed the ring away. Arrius heard the splash where it struck and sank, though he did not look.

Thou hast done a foolish thing,' he said; foolish for one placed as thou art. I am not dependent upon thee for death. 55 Life is a thread I can break without thy help: and, if I do, what will become of thee? Men determined on death prefer it at the hands of others, for the reason

5

that the soul which Plato giveth us is re-
Iellious at the thought of self-destruction;
that is all. If the ship be a pirate, I will
escape from the world. My mind is fixed.
I am a Roman. Success and honor are
all in all. Yet I would have served thee;
thou wouldst not. The ring was the only
witness of my will available in this situa-
tion. We are both lost. I will die re-
gretting the victory and glory wrested 10
from me; thou wilt live to die a little
later, mourning the pious duties undone
because of this folly. I pity thee."

Ben-Hur saw the consequences of his act more distinctly than before, yet he did 15 not falter.

The ship moves off,' he said.
Whither?'

Over on our right there is a galley which I take to be deserted. The newcomer heads towards it. Now she is alongside. Now she is sending men aboard.'

Then Arrius opened his eyes and threw off his calm.

Thank thou thy God,' he said to BenHur, after a look at the galleys, thank thou thy God, as I do my many gods. A pirate would sink, not save, yon ship. By the act and the helmet on the mast I know a Roman. The victory is mine. Fortune hath not deserted me. We are saved Wave thy hand-call to them- bring

In the three years of my servitude, O tribune, thou wert the first to look upon me kindly. No, no! There was another.' The voice dropped, the eyes became hu- 20 mid, and he saw plainly as if it were then before him the face of the boy who helped him to a drink by the old well at Nazareth. 'At least,' he proceeded, thou wert the the first to ask me who I was; and if, 25 when I reached out and caught thee, blind and sinking the last time, I, too, had thought of the many ways in which thou couldst be useful to me in my wretchedness, still the act was not all selfish; this I 30 them quickly. I shall be duumvir, and pray you to believe. Moreover, seeing as God giveth me to now, the ends I dream of are to be wrought by fair means alone. As a thing of conscience, I would rather die with thee than be thy slayer. My 35 mind is firmly set as thine; though thou wert to offer me all Rome, O tribune, and it belonged to thee to make the gift good, I would not kill thee. Thy Cato and Brutus were as little children compared 40 to the Hebrew whose law a Jew must obey.'

But my request. Hast-'

more

Thy command would be of weight, and that would not move me. have said.'

Both became silent, waiting.

Ben-Hur looked often at the coming ship. Arrius rested with closed eyes, indifferent.

thou! I knew thy father, and loved him. He was prince indeed. He taught me a Jew was not a barbarian. I will take thee with me. I will make thee my son. Give thy God thanks, and call the sailors. Haste! The pursuit must be kept. Not a robber shall escape. Hasten them!'

Judah raised himself upon the plank, and waved his hand, and called with all his might; at last he drew the attention of the sailors in the small boat, and they were speedily taken up.

Arrius was received on the galley with all the honors due a hero so the favorite I 45 of Fortune. Upon a couch on the deck he heard the particulars of the conclusion of the fight. When the survivors afloat upon the water were all saved and the prize secured, he spread his flag of com50 mandment anew, and hurried northward to rejoin the fleet and perfect the victory. In due time the fifty vessels coming down the channel closed in upon the fugitive pirates, and crushed them utterly; not one 55 escaped. To swell the tribune's glory, twenty galleys of the enemy were captured.

'Art thou sure she is an enemy?' BenHur asked.

'I think so,' was the reply.

She stops, and puts a boat over the side.'

'Dost thou see her flag?'

Is there no other sign by which she may be known if Roman?'

Upon his return from the cruise, Arrius

had warm welcome on the mole at Mise

num.

troduction into the imperial world. Thc month succeeding Arrius's return, the armilustrium was celebrated with the utmost magnificence in the theater of Scaurus. 5 One side of the structure was taken up with military trophies; among which by far the most conspicuous and most admired were twenty prows, complemented by their corresponding aplustra, cut bod

The young man attending him very early attracted the attention of his friends there; and to their questions as to who he was the tribune proceeded in the most affectionate manner to tell the story of his rescue and introduce the stranger, omitting carefully all that pertained to the latter's previous history. At the end of the narrative he called Ben-Hur to him, 10 ily from as many galleys; and over them, and said, with a hand resting affectionately upon his shoulder,

so as to be legible to the eighty thousand spectators in the seats, was his inscription:

TAKEN FROM THE PIRATES IN THE GULF
OF EURIPUS,

BY

QUINTUS ARRIUS,

DUUMVIR..

From Ben-Hur, 1880.

JOHN FISKE (1842-1901)

The life of John Fiske falls into two distinct periods. After his graduation at Harvard, he was a scientist and philosopher, one of the earliest interpreters in America of the philosophy of Darwin and Spencer, an evolutionist in a day when the doctrine of evolution was supposed to be synonymous with atheism. His earliest books bore such titles as The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origin, Myths and Myth Makers, 1872, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 1874. With his American Political Ideas, 1885, he began upon the work by which he will be longest remembered, at least in iterary circles, his studies in American history. He followed The Critical Period of American History, 1888, and The Beginnings of New England, 1889, with volumes treating upon the Dutch and Quaker settlements, the discovery of America, and the American Revolution, and at the time of his death he was accumulating materials for what must have been, had he lived to accomplish it, a complete and brilliant history of the American people. His writings fully satisfy the modern demand for documen tation and accuracy, and they have, moreover, especially in the department of the historical and biographical essay, a grace of style that admits them into the province of literature. He is simple and straightforward in his narrative, and he is critical and philosophic as well, a philosopher turned historian.

FRANCIS PARKMAN 1

quiet a lazy doubt as to whether Pontiac might be the name of a man or a place Had that conspiracy been an event in Merovingian Gaul or in Borgia's Italy. 5 I should have felt a twinge of conscience at not knowing about it; but the deeds of feathered and painted red men on the Great Lakes and the Alleghanies, only a century old, seemed remote and trivial. Indeed, with the old-fashioned study of the humanities, which tended to keep the Mediterranean too exclusively in the center of one's field of vision, it was not always easy to get one's historical perspective correctly adjusted. Scenes and events that come within the direct line of our spiritual ancestry, which until yesterday was all in the Old World, thus become unduly magnified, so as to deaden our sense of the interest and importance of the things that have happened since our forefathers went forth from their homesteads to grapple with the terrors of an outlying wilderness. We find no difficulty in realizing the historic significance of Marathon and Chalons, of the barons of Runnymede or Luther at Wittenberg: and scarcely a hill or a meadow in the Roman's Europe but blooms for us with 30 flowers of romance. Literature and philosophy, art and song, have expended their

In the summer of 1865 I had occasion almost daily to pass by the pleasant windows of Little, Brown & Co., in Boston, and it was not an easy thing to do without stopping for a moment to look in upon their ample treasures. Among the freshest novelties there displayed were to be seen Lord Derby's translation of the Iliad, 10 Forsyth's Life of Cicero, Colonel Higginson's Epictetus, a new edition of Edmund Burke's writings, and the tasteful reprint of Froude's History of England, just in from the Riverside Press. One day, in 15 the midst of such time-honored classics and new books on well-worn themes, there appeared a stranger that claimed attention and aroused curiosity. It was a modest crown octavo, clad in somber garb, and 20 bearing the title Pioneers of France in the New World. The author's name was not familiar to me, but presently I remembered having seen it upon a stouter volume labeled The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 25 of which many copies used to stand in a row far back in the inner and dusky regions of the shop. This older book I had once taken down from its shelf, just to Copyright by Houghton Mifflin & Co.

richest treasures in adding to the witchery of Old World spots and New World themes.

graves in strange romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us: an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval

But as we learn to broaden our horizon, the perspective becomes somewhat.shifted. 5 It begins to dawn upon us that in New World events, also, there is a rare and potent fascination. Not only is there the interest of their present importance, which nobody would be likely to deny, but there 10 sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool;

is the charm of a historic past as full of
romance as any chapter whatever in the
annals of mankind. The Alleghanies as
well as the Apennines have looked down
upon great causes lost and won, and the 15
Mohawk Valley is classic ground no less
than the banks of the Rhine. To appre-
ciate these things thirty years ago re-
quired the vision of a master in the field
of history; and when I carried home and 20
read The Pioncers of France, I saw at
once that in Francis Parkman we had
found such a master. The reading of the
book was for me, as doubtless for many
others, a pioneer experience in this New 25
World. It was a delightful experience,
repeated and prolonged for many a year,
as those glorious volumes came one after
another from the press, until the story of
the struggle between France and England
for the possession of North America was
at last completed. It was an experience
of which the full significance required
study in many and apparently diverse
fields to realize. By step after step 35
one would alight upon new ways of re-
garding America and its place in universal
history.

30

wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here with their dauntless hardihood put to shame the boldest sons of toil.'

When a writer in sentences that are mere generalizations gives us such pictures as these, one has much to expect from his detailed narrative, glowing with sympathy and crowded with incident. In Parkman's books such expectations are never disappointed. What was an uncouth and howling wilderness in the world of literature he has taken for his own domain, and peopled it forever with living figures, dainty and winsome, or grim and terrible, or sprightly and gay. Never shall be forgotten the beautiful earnestness, the devout serenity, the blithe courage, of Champlain; never can we forget the saintly Marie de l'Incarnation, the delicate and long-suffering Lalemant, the lionlike Brébeuf, the chivalrous Maisonneuve, the grim and wily Pontiac, or that man against whom fate sickened of contending, the mighty and masterful La Salle. These, with many a comrade and foe, have now their place in literature as permanent and such as Tancred or St.

First and most obvious, plainly visible from the threshold of the subject, was its 40 extreme picturesqueness. It is a widespread notion that American history is commonplace and dull; and as for the American red man, he is often thought to be finally disposed of when we have stig- 45 matized him as a bloodthirsty demon and groveling beast. It is safe to say that those who entertain such notions have never read Mr. Parkman. In the theme which occupied him his poet's eye saw 50 Boniface, as the Cid or Robert Bruce. nothing that was dull or commonplace. To bring him vividly before us, I will quote his own words from one of the introductory pages of his opening vol

ume:

'The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their

As the wand of Scott revealed unsuspected depths of human interest in Border castle and Highland glen, so it seems that North America was but awaiting the ma55 gician's touch that should invest its rivers and hillsides with memories of great days gone by. Parkman's sweep has been a wide one, and many are the spots that his