s, which was floating
down to be sold at some market in the Delta. Here and there he met and
hailed a crew of monks, drawing their nets in a quiet bay, or passing
along the great watery highway from monastery to monastery: but all the
news he received from them was, that the canal of Alexandria was still
several days' journey below him. It seemed endless, that monotonous
vista of the two high clay banks, with their sluices and water-wheels,
their knots of palms and date-trees; endless seemed that wearisome
succession of bars of sand and banks of mud, every one like the one
before it, every one dotted with the same line of logs and stones strewn
along the water's edge, which turned out as he approached them to be
basking crocodiles and sleeping pelicans. His eye, wearied with the
continual confinement and want of distance, longed for the boundless
expanse of the desert, for the jagged outlines of those far-off hills,
which he had watched from boyhood rising mysteriously at morn out of
the eastern sky, and melting mysteriously into it again at even, beyond
which dwelt a whole world of wonders, elephants and dragons, satyrs and
anthropophagi,--ay, and the phoenix itself. Tired and melancholy, his
mind returned inward to prey on itself, and the last words of Arsenius
rose again and again to his thoughts. 'Was his call of the spirit or of
the flesh?' How should he test that problem? He wished to seethe world
that might be carnal. True; but, he wished to convert the world.... was
not that spiritual? Was he not going on a noble errand?.... thirsting
for toil, for saintship, for martyrdom itself, if it would but come and
cut the Gordian knot of all temptations, and save him-for he dimly
felt that it would save him--a whole sea of trouble in getting safe and
triumphant out of that world into which he had not yet entered .... and
his heart shrank back from the untried homeless wilderness before
him. But no! the die was cast, and he must down and onward, whether in
obedience to the spirit or the flesh. Oh, for one hour of the quiet of
that dear Laura and the old familiar faces!

At last, a sudden turn of the bank brought him in sight of a
gaudily-painted barge, oil board of which armed men, in uncouth and
foreign dresses, were chasing with barbaric shouts some large object in
the water. In the bows stood a man of gigantic stature, brandishing a
harpoon in his right hand, and in his left holding the line of a second,
the head of wh