Bev. No: think'st thou I'd ruin thee, too? I have enough of shame already. My wife! my wife!-Wouldst thou believe it, Jarvis? I have not seen her all this long night—I, who have loved her so, that every hour of absence seemed as a gap in life. But other bonds have held me. Oh! I have played the boy! dropping my counters in the stream, and reaching to redeem them, lost myself!

Jar. For pity's sake, sir!-I have no heart to see this change.

Bev. Nor I to bear it. How speaks the world of me, Jarvis ?

Jar. As of a good man dead. Of one who, walking in a dream, fell down a precipice. The world is sorry for you.

Bev. Ay, and pities me-Says it not so? But I was born to infamy. I'll tell thee what it says. It calls me a villain; a treacherous husband; a cruel father; a false brother; one lost to nature and her charities; or, to say all in one short world, it calls me-gamester. Go to thy mistress, I'll see her presently.

Jar. And why not now? Rude people press upon her; loud bawling creditors; wretches who know no pity. I met one at the door; he would have seen my mistress. I wanted means of present payment, so promised it to-morrow. But others may be pressing; and she has grief enough already. Your absence hangs too heavy on her.

Bev. Tell her I'll come, then. I have a moment's business. But what hast thou to do with my distresses? Thy honesty has left thee poor, and age wants comfort. Keep what thou hast, lest, between thee and the grave, misery steal in. I have a friend shall counsel me. This is that friend.

a Sound of g? b How pronounced? r § 46.

No. 2. Hardship, subsistence, contented, miserable, admit, forgetful, abundance, prosperous, treacherous, suspicious, friendship.

No. 3. Acrost for across, blowed for blew, bust for burst, fust for furst, pars for parse.

No. 6. Punctuate the first five lines.

No. 7. Matin and matting, surplus and surplice, line and loin, lease, leash, and leech, meek and micke, muslin and muzzling, tale and talk, orison and horison, lineament and liniment, liver and livre, coin and quoin, idol, idle, and idyl, holy, wholly, and holly.

No. 8. § 2. 1. 2. 3. § 3. 10. 11. 9.

No. 10. Analyse the last five lines.

No. 12. All the words in the last five lines, together with the accent and sound of the vowels.

LESSON XXXI.

PETRA.

1. PETRA, the excavated city, the long-lost capital of Edom, in the Scriptures and profane writings, in every language in which its name occurs, signifies a rock; and, through the shadows of its early history, we learn that its inhabitants lived in natural clefts or excavations made in the solid rock.

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2. Desolate as it now is we have reason to believe that it goes back to the time of Esau "the father of Edom" that princes and dukes eight successive kings and again a long line of dukes dwelt therea before any king reigned over Israel" and we recognise it from the earliest ages as the central point to which came the caravans from the interior of Arabia Persia and India laden with all the precious commodities of the East and from which these commodities were distributed through Egypt Palestine and Syria and all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean even Tyre and Sidon deriving their purple and dies from Petra.

3. Eight hundred years before Christ, Amaziah, the king of Judea, "slew of Edom in the Valley of Salt ten thousand, and took Selah (the Hebrew name of Petra) by war." Three hundred years after the last of the prophets, and nearly a century before the Christian era, the "King of Arabia" issued from his palace at Petra, at the head of fifty thousand men, horse and foot, entered Jerusalem, and, unitingd with the Jews, pressed the siege of the temple, which was only raised by the advance of the Romans; and in the beginning of the second century, though its independence was lost, Petra was still the capitalf of a Roman province.

4. After that time it rapidly declined; its history became more and more obscure; for more than a thousand years it was completely lost to the civilized world; and, until its discovery by Burckhart in 1812, excepts to the wandering Bedouins, its very site was unknown.

5. And this was the city at whose door I now stood. In a few words, this ancient and extraordinaryg city is situated within a natural amphitheatre of two or three miles in circumference, encompassed on all sides by rugged mountains five or

six hundred feet in height. The whole of this area is now a waste of ruins, dwelling-houses, palaces, temples, and triumphal arches, all prostrate together in undistinguishable confusion.

6. The sides of the mountain are cut smooth, in a perpendicular direction, and filled with long and continued ranges of dwelling-houses, temples, and tombs, excavated with vast labor out of the solid rock; and while their summits present nature in her wildest and most savage form, their bases are adorned with all the beauty of architecture and art, with columns, and porticoes, and pediments, and ranges of corridors, enduring as the mountains out of which they are hewn, and fresh as if the work of a generation scarcely yet gone by.

7. Nothing can be finer than the immense rocky rampart which encloses the city. Strong, firm, and immovable as nature itself, it seems to deride the walls of cities and the puny fortifications of skillful engineers. The only access is by clambering over this wall of stone, practicable only in one place, or by an entrance the most extraordinary that nature, in her wildest freaks, has ever framed. The loftiest portals ever raised by the hands of man, the proudest monuments of architectural skill and daring, sink into insignificance by the comparison.

8. It is, perhaps, the most wonderful object in the world, except the ruins of the city to which it forms the entrance. Unfortunately, I did not enter by this door, but by clambering over the mountains at the other end; and when I stood upon the summit of the mountain, though I looked down upon the vast area filled with ruined buildings and heaps of rubbish, and saw the mountain-sides cut away so as to form a level surface, and presenting long ranges of doors in successive tiers or stories, the dwelling and burial places of a people long since passed away;m and though immediately before me was the excavated front of a large and beautiful temple, I was disappointed. I had read the unpublished description of Captains Irby and Mangles.

9. Several times the sheik had told me, in the most positive manner, that there was no other entrance; and I was moved to indignation at the marvelous and exaggerated, not to say false representations, as I thought, of the only persons who had given any account of this wonderful entrance. I was disappointed, too, in another matter. Burckhardt had been ac

costed, immediately upon his entry, by a large party of Bedouins, and been suffered to remain but a very short time.

10. Messrs. Legh, Banks, Irby, and Mangles had been opposed by hundreds of Bedouins, who swore "that they should never enter their territory nor drink of their waters,” and “that they would shoot them like dogs if they attempted it." And I expected some immediate opposition from at least the thirty or forty, fewer than whom, the sheik' had told me, were never to be found in Wady Moussa.

11. I expected a scene of some kind; but at the entrance of the city there was not a creature to dispute our passage; its portals were wide open, and we passed along the stream down into the area, and still no man came to oppose us. We moved

to the extreme end of the area; and, when in the act of dismounting at the foot of the rock on which stood the temple that had constantly faced us, we saw one solitary Arab, straggling along without any apparent object, a mere wanderer among the ruins; and it is a not uninteresting fact, that this poor Bedouin was the only living being we saw in the desolate city of Petra.

12. After gazing at us for a few moments from a distance, he came towards us, and in a few moments was sitting down to pipes and coffee with my companions. I again asked the sheik for the other entrance, and he again told me there was none; but I could not believe him, and set out to look for it myself; and although in my search I had already seen enough abundantly to repay me for all my difficulties in getting there, I could not be content without finding this desired avenue.

13. In front of the great temple, the pride and beauty of Petra, of which more hereafter, I saw a narrow opening in the rocks, exactly corresponding with my conception of the object for which I was seeking. A full stream of water was gushing through it, and filling up the whole mouth of the passage. Mounted on the shoulders of one of my Bedouins, I got him to carry me through the swollen stream at the mouth of the opening, and set me down on a dry place a little above, whence I began to pick my way, occasionally taking to the shoulders of my follower, and continued to advance more than a mile.

14. I was, beyond all peradventure, in the great entrance I was seeking. There could not be two such, and I should have gone on to the extreme end of the ravine,a but my Bedouin suddenly refused me the further use of his shoulders.

He had been some time objecting and begging me to return, and now positively refused to go any farther; and, in fact, turned about himself.

15. I was anxious to proceed, but I did not like wading up to my knees in the water, nor did I feel very resolute to go where I might expose myself to danger, as he seemed to intimate. While I was hesitating, another of my men came running up the ravine, and shortly after him Paul and the sheik, breathless with haste, and crying in low gutturals, “El Arab! el Arab!"-"The Arabs !" the Arabs !"n This was enough for me. I had heard so much of El Arab that I had become nervous. It was like the cry of Delilah in the ears of the sleeping Samson, "The Philistines be upon thee." At the other end of the ravine was an encampment of the El Alouins; and the sheik, having due regard to my communication about money matters, had shunned this entrance to avoid bringing upon me this horde of tribute-gatherers for a participation in the spoils. Without any disposition to explore farther, I turned towards the city; and it was now that I began to feel the powerful and indelible impression that must be produced on entering, through this mountainous passage, the excavated city of Petra.

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16. For about two miles it lies between high and precipitous ranges of rocks, from five hundred to a thousand feet in height, standing as if torn asunder by some great convulsion, and barely wide enough for two horsemen to pass abreast. swelling stream rushes between them; the summits are wild and broken; in some places overhanging the opposite sides, casting the darkness of night upon the narrow defile; then receding and forming an opening above, through which a strong ray of light is thrown down, and illuminates with the blaze of day the frightful chasm below.

17. Wild fig-trees, oleanders, and ivy, were growing out of the rocky sides of the cliffs hundreds of feet above our heads; the eagle was screaming above us; all along were the open doors of tombs, forming the great Necropolis of the city; and at the extreme end was a large open space, with a powerful body of light thrown down upon it, and exhibiting in one full view the façade of a beautiful temple, hewn out of the rock, with rows of Corinthian columns and ornaments, standing out fresh and clear, as if but yesterday from the hands of the sculptor.

18. Though coming directly from the banks of the Nile,