was also by separate bands of adventurers from several different states of Greece, so that they started with dialects and did not unite in a common or national organization, the separate cities and their territories being governed by oligarchies or tyrants frequently at war with each other, until, in the fifth century B.C., the Carthaginians began to contribute a new admixture of language and blood, followed by Roman, Vandal, Gothic, Herulian, Arab, and Norman subjugation.  Thus some of the conditions above suggested have existed in this case, but, whatever the explanation, the accounts given by travelers of the extent to which the language of signs has been used even during the present generation are so marvelous as to deserve quotation.  The one selected is from the pen of Alexandre Dumas, who, it is to be hoped, did not carry his genius for romance into a professedly sober account of travel: 

“In the intervals of the acts of the opera I saw lively conversations carried on between the orchestra and the boxes.  Arami, in particular, recognized a friend whom he had not seen for three years, and who related to him, by means of his eyes and his hands, what, to judge by the eager gestures of my companion, must have been matters of great interest.  The conversation ended, I asked him if I might know without impropriety what was the intelligence which had seemed to interest him so deeply.  ‘O, yes,’ he replied, ’that person is one of my good friends, who has been away from Palermo for three years, and he has been telling me that he was married at Naples; then traveled with his wife in Austria and in France; there his wife gave birth to a daughter, whom he had the misfortune to lose; he arrived by steamboat yesterday, but his wife had suffered so much from sea-sickness that she kept her bed, and he came alone to the play.’  ‘My dear friend,’ said I to Arami, ’if you would have me believe you, you must grant me a favor.’  ‘What is it?’ said he.  ’It is, that you do not leave me during the evening, so that I may be sure you give no instructions to your friend, and when we join him, that you ask him to repeat aloud what he said to you by signs.’  ‘That I will,’ said Arami.  The curtain then rose; the second act of Norma was played; the curtain falling, and the actors being recalled, as usual, we went to the side-room, where we met the traveler.  ‘My dear friend,’ said Arami, ’I did not perfectly comprehend what you wanted to tell me; be so good as to repeat it.’  The traveler repeated the story word for word, and without varying a syllable from the translation, which Arami had made of his signs; it was marvelous indeed.