discovered me, wriggled half way down to the foot of my bed, buried under the blankets, and shrieking ‘Perillus’ Bull!  I am roasting in the Brass Bull!’ Being not very ardent disciples of Clio, my solicitous parents failed to understand the nightmare; hence cracked ice was folded over my head (mid-winter), and the family physician ordered a mustard plaster half a yard long, down my spine.  I vividly remember Imilco, and the bovine fury pawing the blackboard; but of the three Punic Wars, then and there tabooed, I recall only the brass monster at Agrigentum.  Leo, when we reach Girgenti, the remaining Mecca of your historic hopes, some time to-morrow, you will understand why, instead of climbing to the temples of the cliff, I shall lock the door of our cabin, and drown the bellowing of the beast in Daudet’s new book.”

“I wish, indeed I do, that you had staid there to-day, instead of coming ashore to dampen all our ardor and enthusiasm by your constant thin drizzle of scorn.  One should suppose that in this idyllic region, some ray of poetic warmth must melt your frigid, scoffing soul.  Daudet suits my sister far better than Theocritus,” answered her brother, fastening a sprig of orange blossom in his button hole.

Pushing back her sailor hat, Alma looked obliquely at him from beneath her drooping lids.

“Try me.  Perhaps infection haunts the air.  Spare us the Greek, come down from your Yale and Harvard heights to the level of my ignorance, and warble for me in English some of your Sicilian lark’s melodies.  At least I have heard of Amaryllis and Simaetha.”

Mr. Cutting shook his head.

“What—?  Ashamed of your bucolic hobby!  No wonder—­since after all it’s only a goat.  I dare you, brother mine, to produce me a Theocritan fragment.”

“Take the consequences of your rash levity; though I have a dawning suspicion some ‘Imp of the Perverse’ has coached you for the occasion.”

He stroked his mustache, pondered a moment, then struck an attitude, and declaimed: 

“I go a serenading to Amaryllis; what time my flocks browse on the mountains, and Tityrus drives them.  Tityrus beloved of me in the highest degree, feed my flocks and lead them to the fountain, etc.”

Mimicking his tone exactly, Alma finished the line: 

“And mind, Tityrus, that tawny Libyan he-goat lest he butt thee!’ Come, Rivers; free translation is allowable, considering surroundings, but not garbling; and every time you know you substituted flocks for goats.  Proceed, and do not insult your pet author with emendations.”

With his hat on the back of his head, and his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, Mr. Cutting resumed: 

    “Sweet Amaryllis! though by death defiled,
     Thee shall I ne’er forget; dear to my heart
     As are my frisking goats, thou did’st depart. 
     To what a lot—­was I, unhappy, born!”

Again the mocking voice responded: