They had three or four hours to spare before sunset, and at once set about the business of sight-seeing. Their first visit was to the temple on the island, and they were followed from the landing by a crowd of idle people, who sometimes pressed too closely for comfort. There was an avenue of trees leading up to the temple, and before reaching the building they passed under a gateway not unlike those they had seen at the[Pg 406] temples in Kioto and Tokio. The temple was not particularly impressive, as its architectural merit is not of much consequence, and, besides, it was altogether too dirty for comfort. There was quite a crowd of priests attached to it, and they were as slovenly in appearance as the building they occupied. In the yard of the temple the strangers were shown the furnaces in which the bodies of the priests are burned after death, and the little niches where their ashes are preserved. There were several pens occupied by the fattest pigs the boys had ever seen. The guide explained that these pigs were sacred, and maintained out of the revenues of the temple. The priests evidently held them in great reverence, and Frank intimated that he thought the habits of the pigs were the models which the priests had adopted for their own. Some of the holy men were at their devotions when the party arrived, but they dropped their prayer-books to have a good look at the visitors, and did not resume them until they had satisfied their curiosity. "I had a Confederate general's pass." "Yes, and that helps to account--"
Hetty promised, wondering. The little room was at the top facing the blank windows of the Corner House. Hetty had no difficulty in finding the box, and a very brief search showed the address she was looking for. The box she emptied in the grate and set fire to the contents with a match she had brought for the purpose. "I'm at No. 1, Lytton Avenue," she said, "Countess Lalage's, you know. Yes, I am quite aware of the fact that it is an empty house. But there is a lot of stuff here that is worth fetching. In fact, there is somebody in the dining-room now. Are you going to do anything, or shall I give the alarm?" The expense of patterns should be divided among and charged to the machines for which the patterns are employed, but there can be no constant rules for assessing or dividing this cost. A pattern may be employed but once, or it may be used for years; it is continually liable to be superseded by changes and improvements that cannot be predicted beforehand; and in preparing patterns, the question continually arises of how much ought to be expended on thema matter that should be determined between the engineer and the pattern-maker, but is generally left to the pattern-maker alone, for the reason that but few mechanical engineers understand pattern-making so well as to dictate plans of construction.
The art of keeping reasonably clean even in a machine shop is worth studying; some men are greased from head to foot in a few hours, no matter what their work may be; while others will perform almost any kind of work, and keep clean without sacrificing convenience in the least. This difference is the result of habits readily acquired and easily retained. At the same time bells rang ... and guns roared. 14th December
One symptom of this reaction was the fashionable archaism of the Augustan age, the tendency to despise whatever was new in literature, and to exalt whatever was old. It is well known how feelingly Horace complains of a movement which was used to damage his own reputation as a poet;309 but what seems to have escaped observation is, that this protest against the literary archaism of his contemporaries is only one symptom of a much profounder division between his philosophy and theirs. He was just as good a patriot as they were, but his sympathies were with the Hellenising aristocracy to which Lucretius and Cicero had belonged, not with the narrow-minded conservatism of the middle classes and the country people. He was a man of progress and free-thought, who accepted the empire for what it might be worth, a Roman Prosper Merime or Sainte-Beuve, whose preference of order to anarchy did not involve any respect for superstitious beliefs simply because they were supported by authority. And this healthy common sense is so much a part of his character, that he sometimes gives his mistresses the benefit of it, warning Leuconoe against the Babylonian soothsayers, and telling202 Phidyle that the gods should be approached not only with sacrifices but with clean hands.310 Yet so strong was the spirit of the age, that the sceptical poet occasionally feels himself obliged to second or to applaud the work of restoration undertaken by Augustus, and to augur from it, with more or less sincerity, a reformation in private life.311 And even the frivolous Ovid may be supposed to have had the same object in view when composing his Fasti. Sandy stayed behind some shrubbery.
In the storm-cleared atmosphere the troops could be seen until they turned into the gap, and shortly thereafter they reappeared, coming back at a trot. It came to pass in the working out of things that the commandant elected to spend the night before the opening of the bids, in the small town some miles away, where one of the first families was giving a dinner. This left Landor, as next in rank, in temporary command. It had happened often enough before, in one way[Pg 189] or another, but this time the duties of the position seemed to weigh upon him. He was restless and did not care to sleep. He sent Felipa off to bed, and sat watching where her lithe young figure had gone out of the door for some minutes. Then he ran his hand across his mouth contemplatively, stroked his mustache, and finally went out of the house and down to Ellton's quarters.
"Great Scott!" muttered Si to himself, for he was not on speaking terms with Shorty, and would not alarm the boys; "there's a porcupine nest to git through. How in the Nation are we ever goin' to do it?" Naomi smiled feebly, and that smile, so wan, so patient, so utterly wistful, so utterly unregretful, with which almost every mother first greets the father of her child, went straight to Reuben's heart. He fell on his knees by the bed, and covered her hand and her thin arm with kisses.
"Oh, no," said Reuben, sitting in yesterday's chair, and gazing up at the Rossetti. Caro, regardless of the suet on her hands, hid her face in them. "You can't keep me out here. It isn't my fault I'm lateand I'm not so very late, either."
HoMEXxXses