“Surely this is the most populous city of the East!  What a wilderness of people! what a jumble of all ranks and ages! what a multiplicity of sects and nations! what a variety of costumes! what a Babel of languages! what a screaming of beasts! what a tinkling of instruments! what a parcel of philosophers!”

Come let us be off.

“Stay a moment!  I see a vast hubbub in the hippodrome; what is the meaning of it, I beseech you?”

That? —­ oh, nothing!  The noble and free citizens of Epidaphne being, as they declare, well satisfied of the faith, valor, wisdom, and divinity of their king, and having, moreover, been eye-witnesses of his late superhuman agility, do think it no more than their duty to invest his brows (in addition to the poetic crown) with the wreath of victory in the footrace —­ a wreath which it is evident he must obtain at the celebration of the next Olympiad, and which, therefore, they now give him in advance.

~~~ End of Text ~~~

Footnotes —­ Four Beasts

{*1} Flavius Vospicus says, that the hymn here introduced was sung by the rabble upon the occasion of Aurelian, in the Sarmatic war, having slain, with his own hand, nine hundred and fifty of the enemy.

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THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

—­Sir Thomas Browne.

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.  We appreciate them only in their effects.  We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment.  As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play.  He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural.  His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis.  Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse.  A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other.  It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood.  I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very