espective camp-stools, waiting for Mr. Whit
to arrive with the grateful beverage? Many is the time, when I have been
watching with a sick child at five in a summer morning, when the little
fellow had just dropped into a grateful morning doze, that I have
listened and waited, dreading the arrival of the Providence morning
express. Because I knew that, a mile and a half out of Boston, the
engine would begin to blow its shrill whistle, for the purpose, I
believe, of calling the Boston station-men to their duty. Three or four
minutes of that _skre-e-e-e_ must there be, as that train swept by our
end of the town. And hoping and wishing never did any good; the train
would come, and the child would wake. Is not that a magnificent power
for one engine-man to have over the morning rest of thirty thousand
sleeping people, because you, old Spartan croaker, who can't sleep easy
underground it seems, want to have everybody waked up at the same hour
in the morning. When I hear that whistle, and the fifty other whistles
of the factories that have since followed its wayward and unlicensed
example, I have wished more than once that we had in Boston a little
more of the firm government of Sybaris.

For if, as it would appear from these instances, Sybaris were a city
which grew to wealth and strength by the recognition of the personal
rights of each individual in the state,--if Sybaris were a republic,
where the individual was respected, had his rights, and was not left to
the average chances of the majority of men,--then Sybaris had found out
something which no modern city has found out, and which it is a pity we
have all forgotten.

I do not say that I went through all this speculation at the Latin
school. I got no further there than to see that the Sybarites had got a
very bad name, and that the causes did not appear in the Greek Reader. I
supposed there were causes somewhere, which it was not proper to put
into the Greek Reader. Perhaps there were. But if there were, I have
never found them,--not being indeed very well acquainted with the lines
of reading in which those who wanted to find them should look for them.

* * * * *

What I did find of Sybaris, when I could read Greek rather more easily,
and could get access to some decent atlases, was briefly this.

Well forward in the hollow of the arched foot of the boot of Italy, two
little rivers run into the Gulf of Tarentum. One was named Crathis, on