It is no accident of the season or of the day; it is the continuous tradition of some thousands of years; it is the very orthodoxy of the myriads who have lived and died there. There was a region once, in an early age, lying upon the Eastern Sea, which is said at length to have vomited out its inhabitants for their frightful iniquity. They, thus cast forth, took ship, and passed over to the southern coast; and then, gradually settling and spreading into the interior, they peopled the woody plains and fertile slopes of Africa, and filled it with their cities. Sicca is one of these set up in sin; and at the time of which we write that sin was basking under the sun, and rioting and extending itself to its amplest dimensions, like some glittering serpent or spotted pard of the neighbourhood, without interposition from heaven or earth in correction of so awful a degradation. In such scenes of unspeakable pollution, our Christian forefathers perforce lived; through such a scene, though not taking part in it, Agellius, blessed with a country home, is unnecessarily passing.

He has reached the house, or rather the floor, to which he has been making his way. It is at the back of the city, where the rock is steep; and it looks out upon the plain and the mountain range to the north. Its inmates, Aristo and Callista, are engaged in their ordinary work of moulding or carving, painting or gilding the various articles which the temples or the private shrines of the established religion required. Aristo has received from Jucundus the overtures which Agellius had commissioned him to make, and finds, as he anticipated, that they are no great news to his sister. She perfectly understands what is going on, but does not care to speak much upon it, till Agellius makes his appearance. As they sit at work, Aristo speaks:—

“Agellius will make his appearance here this morning. I say, Callista, what can he be coming for?”

“Why, if your news be true, that the Christians are coming into trouble, of course he means to purchase, as a blessing on him, some of these bits of gods.”

“You are sharp enough, my little sister,” answered Aristo, “to know perfectly well who is the goddess he is desirous of purchasing.”

Callista laughed carelessly, but made no reply. “Come, child,” Aristo continued, “don’t be cruel to him. Wreath a garland for him by the time he comes. He’s well to do, and modest withal, and needs encouragement.”

“He’s well enough,” said Callista.

“I say he’s a fellow too well off to be despised as a lover,” proceeded her brother, “and it would be a merit with the gods to rid him of his superstition.”

“Not much of a Christian,” she made answer, “if he is set upon me.”

“For whose sake has he been coming here so often, mine or yours, Callista?”

“I am tired of such engagements,” she replied. She went on with her painting, and several times seemed as if she would have spoken, but did not. Then, without interrupting her work, she said calmly, “Time was, it gratified my conceit and my feelings to have hangers on. Indeed, without them, how should we have had means to come here? But there’s a weariness in all things.”

“A weariness! Where is this bad humour to end?” cried Aristo; “it has been a long fit; shake it off while you can, or it will be too much for you. What can you mean? a weariness! You are over young to bid youth farewell. Aching hearts for aching bones. So young and so perverse! We must take things as the gods give them. You will ask for them in vain when you are old. One day above, another day beneath; one while young, another while old. Enjoy life while you have it in your hand.” He had said this as he worked. Then he stopped, and turned round to her, with his graving-tool in his hand. “Recollect old Lesbia, how she used to squeak out to me, with her nodding head and trembling limbs”—here he mimicked the old crone—“‘My boy, take your pleasure while you can. I can’t take pleasure—my day is over; but I don’t reproach myself. I had a merry time of it while it lasted. Time stops for no one, but I did my best; I don’t reproach myself.’ There’s the true philosopher, though a slave; more outspoken than Æsop, more practical than Epictetus.”

Callista began singing to herself:—

“I wander by that river’s brink
Which circles Pluto’s drear domain;
I feel the chill night breeze, and think
Of joys which ne’er shall be again.

“I count the weeds that fringe the shore,
Each sluggish wave that rolls and rolls;
I hear the ever-splashing oar
Of Charon, ferryman of souls.

“Heigho!” she continued, “little 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 the adders of the wood. The natives are crafty and remorseless; they never relax; they have no cheerfulness or mirth; their very love is a furnace, and their sole ecstasy is revenge.”

“No country like home to any of us,” said Aristo; “yet here you are. Habit would be a second nature if you were here long enough; your feelings would become acclimated, and would find a new home. People get to like the darkness of the extreme north in course of time. The painted Britons, the Cimmerians, the Hyperboreans, are content never to see the sun at all, which is your god. Here your own god reigns; why quarrel with him?”

“The sun of Greece is light,” answered Callista; “the sun of Africa is fire. I am no fire-worshipper.”

“I suspect even Styx and Phlegethon are tolerable, at length,” said her brother, “if Phlegethon and Styx there be, as the poets tell us.”

“The cold, foggy Styx is the north,” said Callista, “and the south is the scorching, blasting Phlegethon, and Greece, clear, sweet, and sunny, is the Elysian fields.” And she continued her improvisations:—

“Where are the islands of the blest?
They stud the Ægean sea;
And where the deep Elysian rest?
It haunts the vale where Peneus strong
Pours his incessant stream along,
While craggy ridge and mountain bare
Cut keenly through the liquid air,
And, in their own pure tints arrayed,
Scorn earth’s green robes which change and fade,
And stand in beauty undecayed,
Guards of the bold and free.”

“A lower flight, if you please, just now,” said Aristo, interrupting her. “I do really wish a serious word with you about Agellius. He’s a fellow I can’t help liking, in spite of his misanthropy. Let me plead his cause. Like him or not yourself, still he has a full purse; and you will do a service to yourself and to the gods of Greece, and to him too, if you will smile on him. Smile on him at least for a time; we will go to Carthage when you are tired. His looks have very little in them of a Christian left; you may blow it away with your breath.”

“One might do worse than be a Christian,” she answered slowly, “if all is true that I have heard of them.”

Aristo started up in irritation. “By all the gods of Olympus,” he said, “this is intolerable! If a man wants a tormentor, I commend him to a girl like you. What has ailed thee some time past, you silly child? What have I done to you that you should have got so cross and contrary and so hard to please?”

“I mean,” she said, “if I were a Christian, life would be more bearable.”

“Bearable!” he echoed; “bearable! ye gods! more bearable to have Styx and Tartarus, the Furies and their snakes, in this world as well as in the next? to have evil within and without, to hate one’s self and to be hated of all men! to live the life of an ass, and to die the death of a dog! Bearable! But hark! I hear Agellius’s step on the staircase. Callista, dear Callista, be yourself. Listen to reason.”

But Callista would not listen to reason, if her brother was its embodiment; but went on with her singing:—

“For what is Afric but the home
Of burning Phlegethon?
What the low beach and silent gloom,
And chilling mists of that dull river,
Along whose bank the thin ghosts shiver,
The thin, wan ghosts that once were men,
But Tauris, isle of moor and fen;
Or, dimly traced by seaman’s ken,
The pale-cuffed Albion?”

Here she stopped, looked down, and busied herself with her work.