rending crash. The wooden side is torn out of one, and mutilated,
dismembered, she rights herself, and lies a helpless thing upon the
water. But a last yellow gleam in the blue water shows where her
consort has been dragged to her end in the iron death-grapple of her
foemen. The tiger-striped flag of Carthage has sunk beneath the
swirling surface, never more to be seen upon the face of the sea.

For in that year a great cloud hung for seventeen days over the African
coast, a deep black cloud which was the dark shroud of the burning city.
And when the seventeen days were over, Roman ploughs were driven from
end to end of the charred ashes, and salt was scattered there as a sign
that Carthage should be no more. And far off a huddle of naked,
starving folk stood upon the distant mountains, and looked down upon the
desolate plain which had once been the fairest and richest upon earth.
And they understood too late that it is the law of heaven that the world
is given to the hardy and to the self-denying, whilst he who would
escape the duties of manhood will soon be stripped of the pride, the
wealth, and the power, which are the prizes which manhood brings.



THE CONTEST.


In the year of our Lord 66, the Emperor Nero, being at that time in the
twenty-ninth year of his life and the thirteenth of his reign, set sail
for Greece with the strangest company and the most singular design
that any monarch has ever entertained. With ten galleys he went forth
from Puteoli, carrying with him great stores of painted scenery and
theatrical properties, together with a number of knights and senators,