yond the desert, had no successors in the | family house full of cousins and kinsmen, later half of the century. And with only one evening in the year 1295, about twenyoung Marco added to their band, the ty-four years after their departure, three merchant brothers returned, perhaps a wild and travel-worn figures, in coats of little ashamed of their Christian rulers, coarse homespun like those worn by the perhaps chiefly interested about the recep- Tartars, the sheepskin collars mingling tion they would meet with, and whether with the long locks and beards of the the great Kublai would still remember his wearers, their complexions dark with exluckless ambassadors. posure, their half-forgotten mother tongue The journey back occupied once more a little uncertain on their lips, who three years and a half. It gives us a could believe that these were Venetian strange glimpse into the long intervals of gentlemen, members of an important famsilence habitual to primitive life, to find ily in the city which had forgotten them? that these messengers, without means of The three unknown personages arrived communicating any information of their suddenly, without any warning, at their movements to their royal patron, were ancestral home. One can imagine the more than eight years altogether absent commotion in the courtyard, the curious on the mission from which they returned gazers who would come out to the door, with so little success. In our own days the heads that would gather at every wintheir very existence would probably have dow, when it became known through the been forgotten in such a long lapse of in-house that these wild strangers claimed to terest. Let us hope that the holy oil from the sepulchre, the only thing Christianity could send to the enquiring heathen, was safely kept, in some precious bottle of earliest glass from Murano, or polished stone less brittle than glass, through all the dangers of the journey.

belong to it, to be in some degree its masters the long-disappeared kinsmen, whose portion perhaps by this time had fallen into hands very unwilling to let it go. The doorway which still exists in the Corte della Sabbionera, in the depths of the cool quadrangle, with its arch of Thus the Poli disappeared again into Byzantine work, and the cross above, the unknown for many years. Letters which every visitor in Venice may still were not rife anywhere in those days; and see when he will behind San Chrisostomo, for them, lost out of the range of civiliza- is, as tradition declares, the very door at tion, though in the midst of another full which the travellers knocked and parleyed. and busy world, with another civilization, The house was then, according to the art, and philosophy of its own, there was most authentic account we have, that of no possibility of any communication with Ramusio, un bellissimo e molto alto paVenice or distant friends. It is evident lazzo. Absolute authenticity it is perhaps that they sat very loose to Venice, having impossible to claim for the story. But it perhaps less personal acquaintance with was told to Ramusio, who flourished in the city than most of her merchant adven- the fifteenth century, by an old man, a turers. Niccolo and Matteo must have distinguished citizen who, and whose race, gone to Constantinople while still young, had been established for generations in and Marco was but fifteen when he left the same parish in the immediate vicinity the lagoons. They had apparently no ties of the Casa Polo, and who had heard it of family tenderness to call them back, from his predecessors there a very and custom and familiarity had made the trustworthy source of information. The strange world around, and the half-savage family was evidently well off and importribes, and the primitive court with its tant, and, in all probability, noble. barbaric magnificence, pleasant and inter- those days," says Colonel Yule, making, esting to them. It was nearly a quarter with all his learning, a mistake for once, of a century before they appeared out of "the demarcation between patrician and the unknown again. non-patrician at Venice, where all classes shared in commerce, all were (generally speaking) of one race, and where there were neither castles, domains, nor trains of horsemen, formed no very wide gulf." This is an astounding statement to make in the age of the great conspiracy of Bajamonte Tiepolo; but as Marco Polo is always spoken of as noble, no doubt his family belonged to the privileged class.

By that time the Casa Polo in San Chrisostomo had ceased to think of its absent members. In all likelihood they had no very near relations left. Father and mother would be dead long ago; the elder brother lived and died in Constantinople; and there was no one who looked with any warm expectation for the arrival of the strangers. When there suddenly appeared at the gate of the great

In

The heads of the house gathered to

youth to see and visit Marco, who, though were assessed on the value of one or more no longer young, was the young man of galleys, and he was certainly a volunteer the party; and their questions, and the in some capacity or other in the fleet, a jeer of the new mocking title Marco Mil- defender of his country in the terrible lione, follow the romance with natural warfare which was draining all her rehuman incredulity and satire and laughter. sources. The battle of Curzola took place It is true, and proved by at least one pub- in September, 1298, and it ended in a comlic document, that the gibe grew into seri-plete and disastrous defeat for the Veneous use, and that even the gravest citizens tians. Of the ninety-seven galleys which forgot after a time that Marco of the Mil- sailed so bravely out of Venice, only lions was not the traveller's natural and seventeen miserable wrecks found refuge sober name. There was at least one in the shelter of the lagoons; and the other house of the Poli in Venice, and admiral and the greater part of the survivperhaps there were other Marcos from ors, men shamed and miserable, were whom it was well to distinguish him of carried prisoners to Genoa with every San Chrisostom. demonstration of joy and triumph. The admiral,. as has already been said, was chained to his own mast in barbarous exultation, but managed to escape from the triumph of his enemies by dashing his head against the timber, and dying thus before they reached port.

It would seem clear enough, however, from this, that these travellers' tales met with the fate that so often attends the marvellous narratives of an explorer. Marco's Great Khan, far away in the distance as of another world, the barbaric purple and gold of Kublai's court, the great cities out of all mortal ken, as the young men in their mirth supposed, the incredible wonders that peopled that remote and teeming darkness, which the primitive imagination could not believe in as forming part of its own narrow little universe kept one generation at least in amusement. No doubt the sun-browned traveller had all the desire to instruct and surprise his hearers, which comes natural to one who knew so much more than they, and was capable of being endlessly drawn out by any group of young idlers who might seek his company. They would thread their way through the labyrinth of narrow passages in all their mediæval bravery, flashing along in parti-colored hose and gold-embroidered doublet on their way from the Broglio to get a laugh out of Messer Marco-who was always so ready to commit himself to some new prodigy.

Marco Polo was among the rank and file who do not permit themselves such luxuries. Among all the wonderful things he had seen, he could never have seen a sight at once so beautiful and so terrible as the great semicircle of the Bay of Genoa, crowded with the exultant people, gay with every kind of decoration, and resounding with applause and excitement when the victorious galleys with their wretched freight sailed in. No doubt in the Tartar wastes he had longed many a time for intercourse with his fellows, or even to see the face of some compatriot or Christian amid all the dusky faces and barbaric customs of the countries he had described. But now what a revelation to him must have been the wild passion and savage delight of those near neighbors with but the width of a European peninsula between them, and so much hatred, rancor, and fierce antagonism! Probably, however, Marco, having been born to hate the Genoese, was occupied by none of these sentimental reflections; and knowing how he himself and all his countrymen would have cheered and shouted had Doria been the victim instead of Dandolo, took his dungeon and chains, and the intoxication of triumph with which he and his fellow-prisoners were received, as matters of course.

But after a while the laugh died out in the grave troubles that assailed the republic. The most dreadful war that had ever arisen between Venice and Genoa had raged for some time, through various vicissitudes, when the city at last determined to send out such an expedition as should at once overwhelm all rivalry. This undertaking stirred every energy among the population, and both men and He lay for about a year, as would apmoney poured in for the service of the pear, in this Genoese prison; and here, commonwealth. There may not be au- probably for the first time, his endless thentic proof of Colonel Yule's sugges- tales of the wonders he had seen and tion, that Marco Polo fitted out, or par-known, first fulfilled the blessed office of tially fitted out, one of the boats, and story-telling, and became to the crowded mounted his own flag at the masthead prison a fountain of refreshment and new when it went into action. But the family life. To all these unfortunate groups,

wounded, sick, especially sick for home, | cavaliers, and all who delight in knowing humiliated and forlorn, with scarcely any. the different races of the world, and the thing wanting to complete the round of variety of countries, take this book and misery, what a solace in the tedium of the read it!" This was the proper way, acdreary days, what a help to get through cording to all his rules, to present himself the lingering time, and forget their trou- to the public. He makes his bow to them bles for a moment, must have been this like a showman in front of his menagerie. companion, burned to a deeper brown He knows, too, the language in which to than even Venetian suns and seas could catch the ear of all these fine people, so give, whose memory was inexhaustible, that every noble may desire to have a who day by day had another tale to tell, copy of this manuscript to cheer his who set before them new scenes, new peo- household in the lingering winter, or ple, a great, noble, open-hearted monarch, amuse the poor women at their embroidery and all the quaint habits and modes of while the men are at the wars. For acliving, not of one, but of a hundred tribes cording to all evidence, what the prisoner and nations, all different, endless, original! of Pisa took down from the lips of the All the poor expedients to make the time Venetian in the dungeons of Genoa, was pass, such games as they might have, such written by him in curious antique French, exercises as were possible, even the quar- corrupted a little by Italian idioms, the rels which must have risen to diversify most universal of all the languages of the the flat and tedious hours, could bear no Western world. Nothing can be more comparison with this fresh source of en- unlike than those flourishes of Rusticiano tertainment, the continued story carried by way of preface and the simple strain on from day to day, to which the cramped of the unvarnished tale when Messer and weary prisoner might look forward as Marco himself begins to speak. And the he stretched his limbs and opened his circumstance of these two Italians employeyes to a new unwelcome morning. If ing another living language in which to any one among these prisoners remem-set forth their tale is so curious that bered then the satire of the golden youth, many other theories have been set forth the laughing nickname of the Millione, he had learned by that time what a public benefactor a man is who has something to tell; and the traveller, who perhaps had never found out how he had been laughed at, had thus the noblest revenge.

on the subject, though none which are accepted by the best critics as worthy of belief. One of these, Ramusio, pronounces strongly in favor of a Latin version. Marco had told his stories over and over again, this historian says, with such effect, that Among all these wounded, miserable" seeing the great desire that everybody Venetians, however, there was one whose had to hear about Cathay and the Great presence there was of immediate impor- Khan, and being compelled to begin again tance to the world- a certain Pisan, an every day, he was advised that it would older inhabitant than they of these prisons, be well to commit it to writing "-which a penniless derelict, forgotten perhaps of was done by the dignified medium of a his own city, with nobody to buy him out Genoese gentleman, who took the trouble Rusticiano, a poor poetaster, a rusty to procure from Venice all the notes which brother of the pen, who had written ro- the three travellers had made of their mances in his day, and learned a little of journeys, and then compiled in Latin, acthe craft of authorship. What a wonder-cording to the custom of the learned, a ful treasure was this fountain of strange story for a poor medieval literary man to find in his dungeon! The scribbler seems to have seized by instinct upon the man who for once in his life could furnish him with something worth telling. Rusticiano The story has evidently been saw his opportunity in a moment with an taken down from the lips of a somewhat exultation which he could not keep to discursive speaker, with all the breath himself. It was not his professional na- and air in it of oral discourse. "This is ture to refrain from a great fanfare and enough upon that matter; now I will tell flourish, calling upon heaven and earth to you of something else." "Now let us listen. Signori imperatori e re, duchi leave the nation of Mosul, and I will tell e marchesi, conti, cavalieri, principi,you about the great city of Baldoc." So baroni, he cries out, as he did in his the tale goes on, with interruptions, with romances. "O emperors and kings, O natural goings back: "But first I must dukes, princes, marquises, barons, and tell you- "Now we will go on with

continuous narrative. But the narrative itself and everything that can be discovered about it, are wholly opposed to this theory. There is not the slightest appearance of notes worked into a permanent record.

the other." While we read we seem to | is no evidence of it; or perhaps that tacit sit, one of the eager circle, listening to assent to a foolish and wrong popular verthe story of these wonderful unknown dict, which the instructors of mankind so places, our interest quickened here and often drop into, with a certain indulgent there by a legend some illustration of contempt as of a thing not worth their the prolonged conflict between heathen while to contend against, was in his mind and Christian, or the story of some prodigy who knew so much better than his critics. accomplished; now that of a grain of mus- At all events it is evident that he did nothtard-seed which the Christians were defied ing more to bring himself to the notice of to make into a tree, now a curious Eastern the world. It was in 1299 that he returned version of the story of the three magi. to Venice - on the eve of all those great These episodes have all the character-disturbances concerning the serrata of the istics of the ordinary legend; but the plain and simple story of what Messer Marco saw and heard, and the ways of the unknown populations among whom he spent his youth, are like nothing but what they are a narrative of facts, with no attempt to throw any fictitious interest or charm about them.

No doubt the prisoners liked the legends best, and the circle would draw closer, and the looks become more eager, when the story ran of the Prete Gianni and Genghis Khan, of the Vecchio della Montagna, or of how the calif tested the faith of the Christians. When all this began to be committed to writing, when Rusticiano drew his inkhorn, and pondered his French, with a splendor of learning and wisdom which no doubt appeared miraculous to the spectators, and the easy narrative flowed on a sentence at a time, with half-a-dozen eager critics ready no doubt to remind the raconteur if he varied a word of the often-told tale, what an interest for that melancholy crowd! How they must have peered over each other's shoulders to see the miraculous manuscript, with a feeling of pleased complacency as of a wonderful thing in which they themselves had a hand! No doubt it was cold in Genoa in those sunless dungeons the weary winter through; but so long as Messer Marco went on with his stories, and he of Pisa wrote, with his professional artifices, and his sheet of vellum on his knee, what endless entertainment to beguile dull care away! The captivity lasted not more than a year, and our traveller returned home, to where the jest still lingered about the man with the millions, and no one men. tioned him without a smile. He would not seem to have disturbed himself about this indeed, after that one appearance as a fighting man, with its painful consequences, he would seem to have retired to his home as a peaceful citizen, and awoke no echoes any more. He might perhaps be discouraged by the reception his tale had met with, even though there

Council, and of the insurrections which shook the republic to its foundations. But in all this Marco of the Millions makes no appearance. He who had seen so much, and to whom the great Kublai was the finest of imperial images, most likely looked on with an impartiality beyond the reach of most Venetians at the internal strife, knowing that revolutions come and go, while the course of human life runs on much the same. And besides, Marco was noble, and lost no privilege, probably indeed sympathized with the effort to keep the canaille down.

He

He married in these peaceful years, in the obscurity of a quiet life, and had three daughters only-Faustina, Bellela, and Moretta; no son to keep up the tradition of the adventurous race; a thing which happens so often when a family has come to its climax and can do no more. seems to have kept up in some degree his commercial character, since there is a record of a lawsuit for the recovery of some money of which he had been defrauded by an agent. But only once does he appear in the character of an author responsible for his own story. Attached to two of the earliest manuscript copies of his great book, one preserved in Paris and the other in Berne, are MS. notes, apparently quite authentic, recording the circumstances under which he presented a copy of the work to a noble French cavalier who passed through Venice, while in the service of Charles of Valois in the year 1307. The note is as follows:

This is the book of which my Lord Thiebault, Knight and Lord of Cepoy (whom may God assoil!), requested a copy from Sire Marco Polo, citizen and resident in the city of Venice. And the said Sire Marco Polo, being a very honorable person of high charac his desire that what he had seen should be ter and report in many countries, because of heard throughout the world, and also for the cellent and puissant Prince, my Lord Charles, son of the King of France, and Count of Va lois, gave and presented to the aforesaid Lord of Cepoy the first copy of his said book that

honor and reverence he bore to the most ex