terest in the history of their wanderings, for to the marble of Pentelicus, I verily believe, the world owes in no little degree the artistic development of the Athenian people. "It was a gift of the gods to men," says Mr. Andrew Lang, with poetic vagueness, speaking of the marvellous development of the Athenian intellect and the Athenian æsthetic faculties in the age immediately preceding the era of Pericles. Well, perhaps so; on that point we have no specific information; but, as far as art is concerned, at least, I think it was also, in great part, a gift of the neighboring quarries of Pentelicus. It did not count for nothing in the history of their culture that just outside their city walls the Athenians had that mass of metamorphosed crystalline limestone, altered by the earth's internal heat into pure white marble. As Egypt based herself upon granite, and Babylon upon brick, so Athens based herself upon the Pentelican quarries. Now granite is not precisely what a man might call a plastic material. I doubt if even

Phidias himself could have carved a satisfactory Zeus or Aphrodite from the red rock of Syene that gave us so many stark, stiff Pashts and Memnons. But with marble men may do almost anything they like, and it was on marble of Pentelicus that Athens raised all the countless glories of the Theseum and the Acropolis.

Some day or other, then, presumably about the fifth or sixth century before Christ, some nameless Athenian sculptor carved out of that stone this identical lion, which his countrymen placed at the gate of the Piræus to guard the harbor against the Spartan fleet and all other outlanders. For twenty-two centuries, more or less, those twin lions kept guard over Athens, one at the Piræus, one on the Sacred Way that led from the port to the City of the Violet Crown. All through the Middle Ages, indeed, the Piræus itself was known to the Italian traders who fre quented it as the Porto Leone, the Lion's Harbor; and as such the Frankish merchants knew it almost to the beginning of the present century, when antiquarian zeal for Hellenic tradition revived once more the older name. But what changes did not the lion see meanwhile! The fall of the Athenian Empire, the Spartan supremacy, the hegemony of Thebes, the Macedonian dominion, Philip and Alexander, the reigns of the Successors, the Achæan

league, the Roman conquest, the empire of the Caesars, the advent of new creeds, the Parthenon turned into a Christian church, the seat of civilization transferred from Rome to a brand-new metropolis on the Byzantine Strait ! And then, the long decline of the Empire, the growth of Islam, the inroads of the barbarian, the pressing danger from the Saracen and the Turk. It was in these later days that the romance of the runes was imposed upon the lion of the Piræus mouth, and that Harold Hardrada, who finally lost his life fighting against our own English Harold at Stamford Bridge, piloted his piratical Norse long-boats on another man's quarrel to the port of Athens.

And how strange was the fate that thus brought a Norwegian rover of the age of William the Conqueror into personal contact with Periclean Athens! Harold the Tall, son of Sigurd, nicknamed Hardrada

he of the hard rede, or the stern counsel—was a typical Norse viking of the Berserker order-a man after Carlyle's own heart, I should fancy. A soldier of fortune of the rollicking, buccaneering Danish mould, a Drake or Hawkins of the eleventh century, Harold went round the world in his hot youth in quest of adventure, seeking whom he might devour, killing impartially heathen or Christian, and for conscience' sake asking no questions. In the year of our Lord 1040 this doughty leader found himself in the Mediterranean on one of his usual marauding expeditions. Those were the days when the Scandinavian corsairs played on all seas the selfsame game played later round the southern shores of Europe by their Paynim successors, the Barbary pirates. In all the churches of Christendom the strange litany then went daily up to heaven from thousands and thousands of frightened lips, "A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine," "From all savage assaults of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us." Everywhere the Northern pirate was busily poking his obtrusive nose. A century earlier Rolf the Ganger had walked over Neustria, and turned the fairest provinces of the Frankish king into his dukedom of Normandy, the Northman's land. At that very moment in England itself the descendants of Swegen the Dane had superseded the old native West-Saxon line, and another Harold of the Danish stock was ruling over the citi

zens of London and Winchester. Before long the Norman was to lord it over Sicily, to humble the pride of the Moor in Spain, and to wrest Apulia from the feeble grasp of the Byzantine empire. The Scandinavian then, in short, was bullying the world, as the filibustering Englishman bullies it now in Australasia and South Africa, in the Pacific Islands and the forests of New Guinea.

So Harold Hardrada, like some prototypical Stanley, or Drake, or Wakefield, was cruising about in search of adventure on his own account in the eastern seas. Just at that moment, as chance would have it, the Athenian people, ever in search of some new thing, had revolted from the sway of their liege lord, the Emperor Michael IV., at Constantinople, and the astute Byzantine, playing the familiar old imperial game of utilizing the barbarian against insurgent subjects, bethought him of employing the Berserker chief to bring back the Athenians to their obedience to Cæsar. The runes on the lion of the Venetian Arsenal tell the story of what followed in their own simple pirati

cal way. The tale is short, but, like all that the Northmen wrote, it is very pithy. "Hakon, with Ulf, Asmund, and Orm, conquered this port," says the brief in scription on the lion's left shoulder. "By command of Harold the Tall they levied a contribution on the Greek people, on account of their revolt. Dalk has been detained in outlandish parts. Egil, with Ragnar, was dealing war in Roumania and Armenia."

The sinuous lines on the left shoulder tell an equally simple and graphic story. "Asmund engraved these runes," it says, "with the help of Asgeir, Thorleif, Thord, and Ivar, by command of Harold the Tall, in spite of the strenuous opposition of the Greeks."

Could anything be more delightfully concise and natural ? How we see the whole picture called up in vivid colors before our very eyes-the savage Noise seadogs, with their short, sharp swords, brought face to face by the irony of fate with the last degenerate descendants of the Athenian freemen; the battle in the port; the defeat of the Greeks; the levying of the Danegeld; the submission of the conquered. Then the easy-going pirates, good Philistine souls-ancestors doubtless of our British 'Arry-uncon

The

scious of the desecration of art they are so lightly committing, insist in the innocent pride of their hearts upon scrawling the record of their grand achievement on the shoulders of the antique lion himself, the immemorial guardian of the ancient Piræus. Fancy the speechless horror and futile remonstrances of the scandalized Greeks, with the businesslike determination of Asmund and Thorleif to carve their names in very choice Norwegian on the sculptured stone, whether the Athenians would or whether they would not! entire scene breathes fresh and lively before us. We can see the breathless alaim and horror of the art-loving Hellenes, contrasted with the bland and childlike persistence of the triumphant barbarian to do as he liked in a conquered country. If I were a great painter-say, for example, Mr. Alma Tadema I would paint that episode in deathless colors; as I'm not, I'm glad at any rate that Asmund gained himself a "cheap immortality" by painting it for us in good Scandinavian letters.

When the deed of vandalism was finally done, Harold the Tall sailed away from Piræus in due time, and two years later, after the wont of the barbarian, deposed his employer, the Emperor Michael V., from his fainéant throne, and (having an eye for the ladies) set up in his place Zoe and Theodora as joint empresses of the Eastern Empire. It was not till twentysix years afterward that the tough old pirate fell at last at Stamford Bridge, a few weeks before the battle of Hastings, fighting hard against Harold of England in favor of his traitor brother Tostig. But men might come and men might go; the disfigured lion, with the usual immortality of sculptured stone, still kept its place by the Lion's Port, with the runes that Asmund, Thord, and Thorleif had carved so well scored deep forever upon its dishonored shoulders.

Meanwhile, strange things were happening in the world. On the tidal sandbanks and mudbanks of the Adriatic, where the silt of Po, Adige, and Brenta had been washed by the waves into a long narrow barrier, enclosing a shallow and interrupted lagoon, with its attendant archipelago of low alluvial islands, this city of Venice, in a deserted palace on whose Grand Canal I am this moment inditing this present article, had already risen a few hundred years earlier, by slow and

WHEN Swift wrote his "Modest Proposal," and argued with logical seriousness that the want and over-population in Ireland should be remedied by the simple expedient of eating babies, the inimitable satire was not likely to be lost upon a people who regarded cannibalism with such horror and loathing as do the European nations. The horror must of course be instinctive, because we find it existing in the lowest grades of society; but the instinct is confined to civilized man. The word cannibal is associated in our minds with scenes of the most debased savagery that the imagination can picture; of men in habits and appearance a little lower than the brute; of orgies the result of the most degrading religious superstition. It is not until one has lived on terms of friendship with cannibals that one realizes that the practice is not incompatible with an intel. ligence and moral qualities which command respect. And after all, if one can for a moment lay aside the instinctive horror which the idea calls up, and dispassionately consider the nature of cannibalism, our repugnance to it seems less logically grounded. It is true that it must generally entail murder, but that is certainly not the reason for our loathing of It is something deeper than this; and the distinction we draw between the flesh of men and of animals is at first sight a little curious. One can imagine the inhabitants of another planet, whose physical necessities did not force them to eat flesh,-to take life in order to live,-regarding us with much the same kind of abhorrence with which we look on cannibals. Most of our natural instincts are based upon natural laws, which, when broken, are sure to visit the breaker with their penalties. The eating of unripe fruit, of putrid meat or poisonous matter, are some of these. But no penalty in the shape of disease seems to be attached to cannibalism.

it.

What then are the motives that lead men, apart from the pressure of famine, to practise cannibalism? Among certain African tribes, and lately in Hayti, it has been the outcome of a debased religious superstition, or that extraordinary instinct

common to all races which leads men to connect the highest religious enthusiasm with the most horrible orgies that their diseased imagination can conceive. The feeling that leads members of sects to bind themselves together by the celebration of some unspeakable rite perhaps led to the accusations laid against the Christians of the second century and the Hungarian Jews of the nineteenth. But in the South Seas, although the motive has been falsely attributed to a craving for animal food, it was generally the last act of triumph over a fallen enemy. Thus Homer makes Achilles, triumphing over the dying Hector, wish he could make mince-meat of his body and devour it. Triumph could go no further than to slay and then to assimilate the body of your fee; and the belief that, by thus making him a part of you, you acquired his courage in battle, is said to have led a chief of old Fiji to actually consume himself the entire body of the man he had killed, by daily roasting what remained of it to prevent decomposition.

This is not a very promising introduction to a paper intended to show that some cannibals at least may be very respectable members of society. But it must be clearly understood that the eccentricity which seems so revolting to us is not incompatible with a strong sense of duty, great kindness of heart, and warm domestic affection.

Out of the many cannibals and ex-cannibals I have known, I will choose the most striking figure as the subject of this sketch. I first met the Buli of Nandrau in the autumn of 1886, when I took over the Resident Commissionership of the mountain district of Fiji. His history had been an eventful one, and while he had displayed those qualities that would most win the admiration of Fijians, to us he could not be otherwise than a remarkable character. Far away, in the wild and rugged country in which the great rivers Rewa and Singatoka take their rise, he was born to be chief of a fierce and aggressive tribe of mountaineers. Constantly engaged in petty intertribal wars, while still a young man he had led them

from victory to victory, until they had fought their way into perhaps the most picturesque valley in all picturesque Fiji. Here, perched above the rushing Singatoka, and overshadowed by two tremendous precipices which allowed the sun to shine upon them for barely three hours a day, they built their village, and here they became a name and a terror tc all the surrounding tribes. A few miles lower down the river stood the almost impregnable rock-fortress of the Vatusila tribe, and these became the stanch allies of Nandrau. Together they broke up the powerful Noikoro, exacted tribute from them, and made the river theirs as far as Bemana; together they blotted out the Naloto, who held the passes to the northern coast, killing in one day more than four hundred of them, and driving the remnant as outcasts into the plain. Long after the white men had made their influence felt throughout Fiji,-long after the chief of Bau was courted as King of Fiji, -these two tribes, secure in their mountain fastnesses, lived their own life, and none, whether Fijian or white man, dared pass over their borders.

But their time was come. The despised white man, whom they had first known in the humble guise of a shipwrecked sailor or an escaped convict, was soon to overrun the whole Pacific, and before him the most dreaded of the Fijian gods and chiefs, the most honored of their traditions, were to pass away and be forgotten. In the year 1869, a young Wesleyan missionary named Baker, against the advice of all the most experienced of the European settlers and the native chiefs, announced his intention of exploring the mountain districts alone. What good to the missionary cause he hoped for from his hazardous journey it is difficult to imagine. The harm that would certainly result to his fellow-missionaries if he were killed, and the loss of life that must ensue, must have been apparent to him and to every one else. But in spite of every warning, he persisted in his foolhardy enterprise, and he paid for it with his life and with the lives of several hundred others. He ascended the river Rewa with a small party of native teachers, but when he passed into the mountain district a whale's tooth followed him: for the power of the whale's tooth is this-that he who accepts it cannot refuse the request it car

ries with it, whether it be for a mere gift, or for an alliance, or for a human life. So he went on, while tribe after tribe refused to accept the fatal piece of ivory; but none the less surely did it follow him. At length one night, while he slept in a village of the Vatusila, the whale's tooth passed on before him to the rock fortress of Nambutautau, and their chief, Nawawambalavu, took it. When, next morning, Baker resumed his march, this chief met him in the road, and together they crossed the Singatoka river. As they climbed the steep cliff which leads to Nambutautau, it is recorded in a popular song of that time that the chief warned him ironically of his impending fate. "We want none of your Christianity, Mr. Baker. I think that to-day you and I shall be clubbed." Suddenly, at a spot where the path lies between high reeds, on the edge of a precipice, an attack was made upon them, and they were all struck down except one native teacher, who, slightly wounded, crawled into the thickest of the reeds. Baker's body was flung over the precipice, and the great wooden drum boomed out its death-beat to the villages far down the valley. That night the stone ovens were heated for their work, and the feast was portioned out to the various allies. But the most honorable portion-the head-was sent to Nandrau, the subject of my sketch. At first he refused it, disapproving of the murder, which his foresight warned him would bring trouble upon them. But as his refusal threatened to sever the alliance, he afterward accepted it. It is recorded that the feet, from which the long boots had not been removed, were sent to Mongondro, whose chief, a melancholy, gentlemannered old man, was much disappointed at finding the skin of white men so tough.

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After terrible hardship and danger, the wounded teacher made his way to the coast, and carried the news to Ban. strong alliance was at once formed among the coast tribes to avenge the murder, and to crush the power of the mountaineers. There is in Fiji no gradation between the plains that fringe the coast and the mountains. A sheer barrier of rock, looking like the ruins of a gigantic fortification, rises boldly from the plain, broken only by the valleys which form the river-beds. Behind this wall lay a land of mystery, whose inhabitants were invested with su