“It only remains for me now to point out where and by what means the Diamond may be found.  It is hidden away in—­”

* * * * *

Here the MS., never completed, ended abruptly.

(To be continued.)

RONDEAU.

In vain we call to youth, “Return!”
In vain to fires, “Waste not, yet burn!”
In vain to all life’s happy things,
“Give the days song—­give the hours wings! 
Let us lose naught—­yet always learn!”

The tongue must lose youth, as it sings—­
New knowledge still new sorrow brings: 
Oh, sweet lost youth, for which we yearn
In vain! 
But even this hour from which ye turn—­
Impatient—­o’er its funeral urn
Your soul with mad importunings
Will cry, “Come back, lost hour!” So rings
Ever the cry of those who yearn
In vain.

E. NESBIT.

SAPPHO.

When the Akropolis at Athens bore its beautiful burden entire and perfect, one miniature temple stood dedicated to wingless Victory, in token that the city which had defied and driven back the barbarian should never know defeat.

But only a few decades had passed away when that temple stood as a mute and piteous witness that Athens had been laid low in the dust, and that Victory, though she could never weave a garland for Hellenes who had conquered Hellenes, was no longer a living power upon her chosen citadel.  By the eighteenth century the shrine had altogether disappeared:  the site only could be traced, and four slabs from its frieze were discovered close at hand, built into the walls of a Turkish powder magazine; but not another fragment could be found.

The descriptions of Pausanias and of one or two later travellers were all that remained to tell us of the whole; of its details we might form some faint conception from those frieze marbles, rescued by Lord Elgin and now in the British museum.

But we are not left to restore the temple of wingless Victory in our imagination merely, aided by description and by fragment.  It stands to-day almost complete except for its shattered sculptures, placed upon its original site, and looking, among the ruins of the grander buildings around it, like a beautiful child who gazes for the first time on sorrow which it feels but cannot share.  The blocks of marble taken from its walls and columns had been embedded in a mass of masonry, and when Greece was once more free, and all traces of Turkish occupation were being cleared from the Akropolis, these were carefully put together with the result that we have described.

Like this in part, but unhappily only in part, is the story of the poems of Sappho.  She wrote, as the architect planned, for all time.  We have one brief fragment, proud, but pathetic in its pride, that tells us she knew she was meant not altogether to die: