her soldiers, a handful only found refuge in a friendly Sicilian town. The last months of autumn in 413 B.C. were months of national consternation and household grief. Not long since we were reading of the general aspect of mourning for the slain at Berlin and other German cities. The mourning in Athens was of a deeper dye, since it was accompanied by dismay, if not despair, for the immediate future. Syracuse had been to Athens what Moscow was for Napoleon. Yet early perhaps in the next year there reached the "violet Queen" at first rumours, then credible reports, and at last the glad assurance, that any Athenian prisoner who could recite scenes or passages from the dramas of Euripides was taken out of the dreary stone-quarries of Syracuse, was kindly entreated in Sicilian homes, was nursed if sick or wounded, and if not presently restored to freedom (for such self-denial the captors prized their captives too highly), yet treated not as a slave, but as a welcome and honoured guest. Some indeed—how few or how many cannot be told—were suffered to return to Attica; and of these—poor gleanings after a bloody reaping—some can hardly have failed to go to the house of their deliverer, and with faltering voice and tearful eyes implored the gods, since they could not, to reward him. "Little thought we," they may be imagined to have said to him, "when we saw represented in your 'Trojan Women' the desolation of a hostile city, troops of warriors dragged in chains to the black ships of the Achæans, tender and delicate princesses told off to their allotted owners; or again, in your 'Suppliants,'
