regret, but much dread. The young have to
fear more than the old have to mourn over. The future outweighs the past.
Life is not so sweet as death is bitter. It is hard to quit the light, the
light of heaven."

"Callistidion!" he said, impatiently; "my girl, this is preposterous. How
long is this to go on? We must take you to Carthage; there is more trade
there, if we can get it; and it will be on the bright, far-resounding sea.
And I will turn rhetorician, and you shall feed my classes."

"O beautiful, divine light," she continued, "what a loss! O, to think that
one day I must lose you for ever! At home I used to lie awake at night
longing for the morning, and crying out for the god of day. It was like
choice wine to me, a cup of Chian, the first streaks of the Aurora, and I
could hardly bear his bright coming, when he came to me like Semele, for
rapture. How gloriously did he shoot over the hills! and then anon he
rested awhile on the snowy summit of Olympus, as in some luminous shrine,
gladdening the Phrygian plain. Fair, bright-haired god! thou art my
worship, if Callista worships aught: but somehow I worship nothing now. I
am weary."

"Well," said her brother in a soothing tone, "it is a change. That light,
elastic air, that transparent heaven, that fresh temperate breeze, that
majestic sea! Africa is not Greece; O, the difference! That's it,
Callista; it is the _nostalgia_; you are home-sick."

"It may be so," she said; "I do not well know what I would have. Yes, the
poisonous dews, the heavy heat, the hideous beasts, the green
fever-gendering swamps. This vast thickly-wooded plain, like some
mysterious labyrinth, oppresses and disquiets me with its very richness.
The luxuriant foliage, the tall, rank plants, the deep, close lanes, I do
not see my way through them, and I pant for breath. I only breathe freely
on this hill. O, how unlike Greece, with the clear, soft, delicate
colouring of its mountains, and the pure azure or the purple of its
waters!"

"But, my dear Callista," interrupted her brother, "recollect you are not
in those oppressive, gloomy forests, but in Sicca, and no one asks you to
penetrate them. And if you want mountains, I think those on the horizon
are bare enough."

"And the race of man," she continued, "is worse than all. Where is the
genius of our bright land? where its intelligence, playfulness, grace, and
noble bearing? Here hearts are as black as brows, and smiles as
treacherous as th