ange foreboding seized their
souls, and they looked at each other with great eyes, and smiled with
alien lips, and burst into quenchless laughter, though their eyes were
filled with tears; and how Ulysses drew his own mighty bow, which not
one of them could use, and how he handled it, and twanged the string
till it sang like a swallow in his ear, and sent the arrow flying with a
whiz through the twelve iron rings of the line of axes; and then,
lastly, how, like to a god, he leapt on his own threshold with a shout,
and gathered his rags about him, and aided by the young Telemachus and
the divine Swineherd, sent hurtling into the band of wine-stained
rioters the swift arrows of inevitable death.

Pleased with the tale, which the girls decided, in spite of Cyril's
veto, to be a genuine novel, they asked for a new Greek romance, and
Julian read to them from Herodotus about the rise and fall of empires,
and "Strange stories of the deaths of kings." One of his stories was
the famous one of Croesus, and the irony of his fate, and the warning
words of Solon, all of which, rendered into quaint rich English, struck
Cyril so much, that, mingling up the tale with reminiscences of
Longfellow's "Blind Bartimeus," he produced, with much modesty at the
breakfast-table next morning, the following very creditable boyish
imitation:--

"Speak Grecia's wisest, thou, 'tis said,
Full deeply in Life's page hast read,
And many a clime hath known my tread;
Tis pantoon olbiotatos?

"The monarch raised his eager eye,
Gazed on the sage exultingly,
And slow came forth the calm reply
Tellos ho Atheenaios.

"Upon his funeral pyre he lay
Crownless, his sceptre passed away,
The shade of Solon seem to say,
oudeis toon zoontoon holbios.

"How little thought that Grecian sage
Those words should live from aye to aye,
Tis pantoon olbiotatos?
Tellos ho Atheenaios,
oudeis toon zoontoon holbios."

[Note. These verses were really written by a boy of fourteen.]

In a manner such as this the summer hours glided happily away. But all
things, happy or mournful, must come to an end, lest we should forget
God in our prosperity, or curse Him in our despair. Too quickly for all
their wishes their last Sunday in Switzerland had come. Most of them
had spent the day in thoughtful retirement or quiet occupations, and
both morning and evening they assembled together in their pleasant
sitting-room for matins and evensong.