the north. If the rulers of the south were | the princes_ of Ma'in, whose power extended to Gaza, the rulers of the north ought to be found in Egypt or Palestine. Future research may tell us who they were, and when they lived.

say only. But my notes may none the less tend to show that he was too severe. So few of the tourist race trouble Sardinia that they may also be acceptable for their information. Even in Italy the island is regarded, somewhat romantically, as a country where old marble palaces of the times of the Arragon rule may be bought for a song, and where it costs nothing to live. And the average Italian, who knows anything about it, imagines that it is a barbaric land where he will find no cafés with chairs set in the sun or the shade, and the like concessions to the dissolute tastes of civilization.

But the epigraphy of ancient Arabia is still in its infancy. The inscriptions already known to us represent but a small proportion of those that are yet to be discovered. Vast tracts have never yet been traversed by the foot of an explorer, and there are ancient ruins which have never yet been seen by the eye of the European. What has been accomplished already with the scanty means still at our disposal is an earnest of what remains to be done. The dark past of the Arabian peninsula has been suddenly lighted up, and we find that long before the days of Mohammed it was a land of culture and literature, a seat of powerful kingdoms and wealthy commerce, which cannot fail to have exercised an influence upon the general history of the world.

From The Cornhill Magazine. AMONG THE SARDES.

Every evening a mail packet steams from Civita Vecchia into the red glow of the declining sun, and reaches Sardinia ten or twelve hours after she starts. This is the shortest route. It is also, I think, the most impressive; for one then lands with the mails in the Aranci Gulf at four or five o'clock in the morning, and the picture of the broken mountains, which grip the gulf like the curves of a forceps, rising phantasmally against a cloudy, star-bespangled sky, stays in the memory. The dawn breaks before the train leaves for Cagliari, and allows one further to see the islets of ruddy granite in the pale purple water, and the long, undulated tongues of land which bind the bay. Rocks and slopes alike are matted with a tangle of wild mint, thyme, lavender, cistus, and gorse, and the perfume of the air is ravishing. Two or three white houses with vermilion roofs, and the longer white body of the railway station, are all the signs of human life in this the northern terminus of Sardinia. But, ere we depart, a score of yellow-skinned natives gather from Heaven knows where, to see us off. As types of manhood they are not very imposing. The moist air may not be very good for the lungs, but it is odd to mark these sons and daughters of the soil shielding their mouths with cloaks and shawls, as if they were in peril of firedamp.

On the whole the ancients seem to have had no good opinion of Sardinia. It was a capital corn-field, but a very undesirable place of residence. There was no better province whither to promote an obnoxious Roman of rank. If he did not die of the fever, he might be disgraced for his inability to control the Barbaricini, or mountaineers of the Barbagia district.

Cicero, in particular, is very hard on the island. True, he congratulates his brother, Quintus Tullius, on being sent there. But it is a sardonic congratulation. "You could not," he says, "be in a better place to be forgotten by your creditors." At another time he warns him: "Take care of your health, for, although it is winter, remember that you are in Sardinia." Elsewhere, in his legal capacity, as the opponent of Tigellius, the Sarde poet, whose advocate he was to have been: "I esteem it," he says, "an advantage that I am not pleading for a man more pestilential than his country." Perhaps there was more of the bully than the judicial spirit in these and the like utterances; but such abuse, from so great a man, was sure to hit its mark.

In this paper I do not propose to enter the lists with Cicero, who probably never set foot in Sardinia, and spoke from hear

This is one's first experience of the Sardes, and I do not know that subsequent closer acquaintance alters the idea it gives of them. As we run through the land towards the capital, we see more of them. The railway stations here, as in the American States, seem to be the trysting spots of the adjacent villages. A big slate is set conspicuously on every station wall, with the day of the week and the date chalked upon it. The people may therefore pretend that they muster by the train for their education. Anyhow, there they

are; and as nearly each village in Sardinia boasts of a costume differing from that of its neighboring village, we have a kaleidoscopic picture of colors and very old fashions in the course of our jaunt. From early times the Sarde women have had a name for the indelicacy of their dress. Dante (Purg. xxiii. 94) taunts the ladies of Florence in his day with being even less decent than certain of their Sarde sisters. Unless they are at work in the fields, the latter wear their skirts long enough. But stays they abhor; and it is the meagre white linen covering they draw, or do not draw, over their shapely bosoms that has gained them this censure. But what a Sarde woman neglects in one particular, she atones for in another. Her festa bodice, for example, would dazzle British eyes. It is of satin, any color you please, and heavily broidered with gold and silver lace. The thing is of course valuable. It may have been her grandmother's, or her grandmother's grandmother's; and, God willing, it will survive to be the pride of her granddaughter's granddaughter's soul. On festa days she wears other inherited treasure in the shape of filigree gold trinkets, earrings, necklets of triple fold, armlets, and brooches. A rich farmer lady of Sardinia is then a sight to see, and, discreetly, to laugh at. Her fortune is veritably all upon her person. And the jingle of her precious metals, as she struts cumbrously under a large green sunshade, ever and again glancing to see that she has dropped none of her, ornaments, is enough to turn a Jew crazy with avaricious desire. Festa days occur daily in this or that part of the island, for the local calendar is notably rich in martyrs during the Diocletian persecution, and so one sees many of these bullion-clad dames at the railway stations. The men, too, are picturesque, with their guns and sheepskin jackets (the mastruca), but they are not to be compared with the women. What is a black Phrygian cap to a headgear of scarlet silk pocket-handkerchiefs and how trivial is a white cotton skirt, short, and belted at the waist (the common apparel of a man), by the side of the ample gown of a large dame, covered in front by an expansive silk apron in a design of green and blue flowers!

The scenery of Sardinia, or rather such of it as the mere railway traveller sees, is less spectacular than the people. The island, as a whole, is very mountainous, but nature has left a series of broad, long flats from north to south, linked to each other by gentle rises and depressions.

These have of course attracted the engi neers who were summoned to set a rail. way in the land. Thus we are eternally between mountains, and nearly always on the level. Many of the mountains are volcanic, and old lava streams are to be distinguished between their shorn cones and rounded humps and the valleys. Here and there we steam across spacious areas of nothing in the world but gum cistus bushes, blooming their very best. It is as if a snow-storm had come upon the land, and each flake had stayed unmelted where it had fallen. Then there are oak woods, interspersed with cork-trees reft of their bark; and under the oak myriads of asphodels lift their pale, stately heads.

All this is, however, the exception. The eye gets accustomed to level meadows, broken by purling brooks with ferny banks, from which the yellow oxen give us iazy stares of greeting. A few shaggy shepherds, mounted, and with guns slung to their shoulders, also grin at us from these watering-places. Otherwise there is not much to keep one in mind that this is Sardinia.

a

Not much; but something. For whether we are in the woods, or going dryshod through a swamp, or groaning up to a new watershed, every now and then we pass building like a Martello tower, or a windmill shorn of its sails. These are the famous noraghe, about which so much has been written. To this day the world cannot determine whether they were temples or guard-houses, or an ancient form of cottage, or sepulchres, or altars of sacrifice. They are of massive construction, so that the modern Sardes in search of convenient building material cannot do more than lift the upper stones from them. This explains their ruined state whenever they are near a village. But there are many hundreds of them in the wilds, on remote plateaux and elsewhere, far from habitations, and thus guarded from the spoilers. Some are half hid among the woods, and overgrown by ivy and scrub. Others stand nakedly on the spurs of the mountains, whence they are landmarks for a score of miles. Others, again, are set in the plains, with commonplace surroundings of meadow-land and grain-fields. The latter-day Sardes accept them as an essen. tial feature of their country; they do_not even puzzle their wits about them. Formerly incantations and midnight spells were worked within and around them; they were ransacked for treasure; or they served as convenient haunts for the bandits who swarmed in the land. But now

Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, is a sufficiently interesting city of the hot southern type, fringed with prickly pear, and having gardens of orange-trees set about with palms. It is very old, of course. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Spaniards, and Italians have all had a hand in its creation or mutilation. One may here stumble over ruins, and muse in an amphitheatre, to one's heart's content. There is a whole suburb of ancient sepulchres, hewn in the rock, most of which have been turned into donkeysheds or cow-houses. To guard them selves from the flies, these quadrupeds thrust their noses into the niches that once held honored dust. Only one of these sepulchres is protected. This is called "the Viper's Grotto," because of the two vipers chiselled on its elaborate pediment. The inscriptions hereon unfold a pathetic tale. One Philip, a Roman, his wife Pomptilla, and their family were here interred. Pomptilla seems to have given her life for her husband's, and the different verses commemorating the sacrifice suggest that the poets of Sardinia were here summoned to a competitive examination on the subject-for their common immortalization. From the tomb one looks down at the stagni, the blue bay of Cagliari, and the distant mountains of the south-west corner of Sardinia.

These stagni are a pleasant or unpleasant feature of Sardinia, according to the season. In winter and spring they are bright and innocent enough. Cagliari is flanked by their broad glistening expanses, one of them being not less than thirty miles in circumference. For most of the year, scores of thousands of flamingoes may here be seen standing kneedeep in the water. Late in the spring, however, they withdraw to Africa to breed. The Sardes call them by a name meaning "the red people." Of old they were esteemed good to eat, though modern experimentalists say they are tough. But in summer the stagni lose this element of color. They also lose a good

The pope Pius V. in his day described Cagliari as "Hortus cœlestium plantationum.' I believe the phrase was due to the discovery of an infinite quantity of bones under the cathedral, which bones were, without impartial inquiry, assumed to be the relics of some of Sardinia's many saints. From his Holiness's point of view, Cagliari may be what he calls it, but to the ordinary person of unsublimed intelligence and weak legs it is only a white town built at the base of a rock, and rising with the rock itself to the absurd height of about four hundred feet above the sea. The narrow streets all pivot from the summit of this terrible hill. They are, moreover, cobbled, so that the toil of climbing them is piquantly alloyed with a little pain. And they are used by the occupiers of the tall houses on either side as drying-grounds for the clothes from the washtub; so that, though the town is enlivened by the perennial supply of crimson petticoats and blue bodices which hang thus between heaven and earth, the pedestrian is bedewed by a rain that is not wholly celestial.

But in spite of these drawbacks Cagliari is an agreeable place, especially for those who live on the top of the hill and are under no obligation ever to descend it. It has old towers and old churches, and from its eyrie one may see Bruncu Spina, the highest mountain of the island, some seventy miles distant, on the one side, and nearly to Africa, across the sea, on the other side. Of its ancient towers, the one called the Elephant appeals most strongly to the imagination. It gets its name from the carven elephant over the mouldering portcullis of its entrance, and it was erected, as its inscription tells us, in the year 1307, when the Pisans held Cagliari. The builder of the pile, "Magister Capula Joannes," has for six centuries advertised himself as a man never yet found remissful in his undertakings." It is a pity he has not lived long enough to profit by the reputation this tower would certainly ere this have procured for him. It was here that, in 1671, they suspended in an iron cage the heads of a number of men who had conspired together and assassinated the viceroy, a person obnoxious to them. For sixteen years these heads were allowed to grin changefully at the