kidnapping, and wants my patronage to help her out of it ....
Three-quarters of a mile of roasting sun between me and home! ....
I must hire a gig, or a litter, or some-thing, off the next stand
.... with a driver who has been eating onions .... and of course
there is not a stand for the next half-mile. Oh, divine aether! as
Prometheus has it, and ye swift-winged breezes (I wish there were
any here), when will it all be over? Three-and-thirty years have I
endured already of this Babel of knaves and fools; and with this
abominable good health of mine, which won't even help me with gout
or indigestion, I am likely to have three-and-thirty years more of
it....I know nothing, and I care for nothing, and I expect nothing;
and I actually can't take the trouble to prick a hole in myself, and
let the very small amount of wits out, to see something really worth
seeing, and try its strength at something really worth doing--if,
after all, the other side the grave does not turn out to be just as
stupid as this one .... When will it be all over, and I in
Abraham's bosom--or any one else's, provided it be not a woman's?'



CHAPTER V: A DAY IN ALEXANDRIA


In the meanwhile, Philammon, with his hosts, the Goths, had been
slipping down the stream. Passing, one after another, world-old
cities now dwindled to decaying towns, and numberless canal-mouths,
now fast falling into ruin with the fields to which they ensured
fertility, under the pressure of Roman extortion and misrule, they
had entered one evening the mouth of the great canal of Alexandria,
slid easily all night across the star-bespangled shadows of Lake