where Dido lay burning!

"He knew," says his admiring biographer, "what the madness of women
could do;" but the breeze was getting up astern, and favoring gods
beckoned him on to Italy and fortune; so he sighed twice or
thrice--perhaps he wept, for the amiable hero's tears were always ready
on the shortest notice--and then, like the captain of the _Hesperus_,
"steered for the open sea."

Did he feel a pang of remorse or shame at that meeting in the twilight
of Hades, when he called vainly on Elissa, and the dead queen, from
where she stood by the side of Sychæus, who had forgiven her all, turned
on him the disgust and horror of her imperial eyes? Who can tell? The
greatest and best of men have their moments of weakness. If so, be sure
he was soon comforted as he reviewed the shadowy procession of his
posterity of kings. The episode of Byrsa would scarcely trouble his
conjugal happiness, or make him more indulgent to the mildest flirtation
of Lavinia.

I fancy that poor princess--after listening to a long, intensely proper
discourse from her immaculate husband, or when the young Iulus had been
unusually disagreeable--gazing wistfully in the direction where, against
the sky-line, rose the clump of plane-trees, under which hot-headed,
warm-hearted Turnus was resting after his brief life of storms. Then she
would think of that unhappy mother who, with every impulse of a willful
nature, loved her child so dearly, till she would begin to doubt--it was
very wrong of her--if Amata or the match-making gods were most right
after all.

The neighboring peasantry regarded Mohun with mingled dislike and