But, in fact, the gentleman who sat before the backlog in his winter-house had other things to think of.  For Nebuchadnezzar was coming that way with the chariots and horses of Babylon and a great crowd of marauders; and the king had not even the poor choice whether he would be the vassal of the Chaldean or of the Egyptian.  To us, this is only a ghostly show of monarchs and conquerors stalking across vast historic spaces.  It was no doubt a vulgar enough scene of war and plunder.  The great captains of that age went about to harry each other’s territories and spoil each other’s cities very much as we do nowadays, and for similar reasons;—­Napoleon the Great in Moscow, Napoleon the Small in Italy, Kaiser William in Paris, Great Scott in Mexico!  Men have not changed much.

—­The Fire-Tender sat in his winter-garden in the third month; there was a fire on the hearth burning before him.  He cut the leaves of “Scribner’s Monthly” with his penknife, and thought of Jehoiakim.

That seems as real as the other.  In the garden, which is a room of the house, the tall callas, rooted in the ground, stand about the fountain; the sun, streaming through the glass, illumines the many-hued flowers.  I wonder what Jehoiakim did with the mealy-bug on his passion-vine, and if he had any way of removing the scale-bug from his African acacia?  One would like to know, too, how he treated the red spider on the Le Marque rose.  The record is silent.  I do not doubt he had all these insects in his winter-garden, and the aphidae besides; and he could not smoke them out with tobacco, for the world had not yet fallen into its second stage of the knowledge of good and evil by eating the forbidden tobacco-plant.

I confess that this little picture of a fire on the hearth so many centuries ago helps to make real and interesting to me that somewhat misty past.  No doubt the lotus and the acanthus from the Nile grew in that winter-house, and perhaps Jehoiakim attempted—­the most difficult thing in the world the cultivation of the wild flowers from Lebanon.  Perhaps Jehoiakim was interested also, as I am through this ancient fireplace,—­which is a sort of domestic window into the ancient world,—­in the loves of Bernice and Abaces at the court of the Pharaohs.  I see that it is the same thing as the sentiment —­perhaps it is the shrinking which every soul that is a soul has, sooner or later, from isolation—­which grew up between Herbert and the Young Lady Staying With Us.  Jeremiah used to come in to that fireside very much as the Parson does to ours.  The Parson, to be sure, never prophesies, but he grumbles, and is the chorus in the play that sings the everlasting ai ai of “I told you so!” Yet we like the Parson.  He is the sprig of bitter herb that makes the pottage wholesome.  I should rather, ten times over, dispense with the flatterers and the smooth-sayers than the grumblers.  But the grumblers are of two sorts,—­the healthful-toned and the whiners.  There are makers of beer who substitute