a priest and lord, who is described as "one very
great among mortals." They went down to the
pit, with the records that are their letters of
introduction to the antiquaries of the nineteenth
century.

Carthage, too, has, after all, been
incompletely blotted out. After three months' labour
on the site of ancient Carthage, Mr. Nathan
Davis found, two or three years ago, that the
keeper of the French chapel there had been
stimulated, by observation of his wanderings, to
dig at the foot of a piece of wall near a wide
pit that had been opened in vain by searchers
among the apparently poor ruins of the temple
of Astarte. He found in a few hours a charming
mosaic, measuring about four feet by
two and a half. It was complete, and the
nature of the ground made it appear to him
impossible that there could be more. But Mr.
Davis, setting men to work, soon disclosed
the bright mosaics of the corner of a temple
floor adorned with a colossal female bust, and
with two full robed priestesses dancing before
their goddess. More digging brought to light
more of the rich pavement trodden by the
worshippers in a great temple that had been
restored when Carthage became the capital of
Roman Africa. Much more of old Carthage
has since been found. The Carthaginian houses
were built, above the lower story, with what
Pliny called formacean walls; of earth enclosed
between boards; such walls being declared proof
against rain, wind, and fire. There yet remain
turrets of earth built by Hannibal as watch-
towers on Spanish mountain-tops. But when
these earthen walls of Carthage fell in ruins
they formed heaps of rubbish, that a few years
would transform into mounds of apparently
natural soil, with nothing left under them but
unsuspected pavements, through which the
Romans often dug in the rebuilding of the city.
A thin layer of charcoal, or some other evidence
of the action of fire, is always found on the
remains of ancient Carthage. The use of clay
bricks for building has been assigned as one
main cause of the complete disappearance of
Babylon. For Babylon the mighty city is fallen.
Scarcely a detached figure or tablet has been
dug from the vast heaps that are the graves of
all its glory.

A POODLE AT THE PROW.

"I KNOW," he seemed to say, "that four-
leggedness is at a discount in this amphibious
place. I am aware that Lord Byron is dead,
and that nobody since his lordship's time has
ridden a horse along the Riva degli Schiavoni.
I have been told, by an uncle of mine, that in
the last century the idea, in the superlatively
sarcastic degree, of a sinecure, was that of
Master of the Horse to the Chief of the late
Republic. I apprehend that the old Lion on
the pillar yonder, and on the myriad bas-reliefs,
brooches, and panels in mosaic and fresco
besides, was furnished with wings through a
preconceived conviction on the part of his designers
that legs could be of no possible use to him. I
grant that I might be more welcome were I a
dolphin, or a mermaid, or a Nereid, or a Triton,
or something scaly, or watery, or finny. At all
events, the force of circumstances has driven me
here. Let me put in a plea in favour of the
four-legged creation. You won't see many
quadrupeds during your stay in these parts. I
will walk on my hind-legs, if you insist upon it,
but don't utterly disdain my fore-paws. Mayn't
I come too?"

There was no refusing a poodle so remarkably
well behaved and so scrupulously clean shaven,
He had an insinuating way about him that
disarmed objection. Grave yet urbane, learned
yet devoid of pedantry, polite but not servile, he
was a pattern to all possible poodles. Pray understand,
to begin with, that he was not a Frenchman.
I was rashly about to address him as
Monsieur, but haply reflected, and, accosting
him as Signore, asked him when he was last at
Bologna? No grinning, chattering, mopping,
mowing Parisian mountebank was he. His ears
and tail gave emphasis to the parlance of his
eyes, but in gesticulation he never indulged.
There was nothing theatrical, nothing tawdry
in his appearance or demeanour. They have
gotten a dreadful habit in the French capital
of staining their poodles all over with sky-
blue or rose-pink. Had this Italian poodle
been subjected to such an affront, he would have
died, I believe. Yes; he was a scholar and a
gentleman. He took every morning, it was easy
to notice, his salt-water bath, then had a douche
of the warm soft fresh, and was ultimately
lathered with fine soap, and shaved. His frills,
and tuckers, and whiskers remaining after the
application of the razor, were not crisped and
pinched into impertinent and obtrusive gauffres,
but hung in soft and flossy curls, the Order of
the Snowy Fleece, about him. His shaven parts
blushed with a delicate, creamy carnation. He
had never had sore eyes. His nose, only, seemed
to have been tipped with a little patent blacking.
His nails were beautifully pared, filbert fashion.
For all ornament, he had a slender collar of blue
silk fastened with a golden shell. He had a
gentle way of pattering about, and hesitating
when he found his front paw on a slippery part
of the boat. He had a persuasive way of
wagging, or rather of mildly undulating, his tufted
tail. No violence, no haste, no irrational
uncertainty, but a deliberate, well-weighed expression
of complacency. Had the old lion on the
pillar wagged his tail, he could not have done it
more majestically. At a glance, you saw this
poodle to be intelligent, well educated, and
refined—a poodle that had seen men, if not cities,
and marked their ways.

He was larger than the ordinary run of
poodles, but an inch shorter than a remarkable
specimen of the breed in question I once knew
called Neno. He was from Bergamo. He visited
this country in 1859, but getting into some
trouble through a whimsical habit of pulling off
people's hats in Hyde Park, and throwing them