“Well,” said her brother in a soothing tone, “it is a change. That light, elastic air, that transparent heaven, that fresh temperate breeze, that majestic sea! Africa is not Greece; O, the difference! That’s it, Callista; it is the nostalgia; you are home-sick.”

“It may be so,” she said; “I do not well know what I would have. Yes, the poisonous dews, the heavy heat, the hideous beasts, the green fever-gendering swamps. This vast thickly-wooded plain, like some mysterious labyrinth, oppresses and disquiets me with its very richness. The luxuriant foliage, the tall, rank plants, the deep, close lanes, I do not see my way through them, and I pant for breath. I only breathe freely on this hill. O, how unlike Greece, with the clear, soft, delicate colouring of its mountains, and the pure azure or the purple of its waters!”

“But, my dear Callista,” interrupted her brother, “recollect you are not in those oppressive, gloomy forests, but in Sicca, and no one asks you to penetrate them. And if you want mountains, I think those on the horizon are bare enough.”

“And the race of man,” she continued, “is worse than all. Where is the genius of our bright land? where its intelligence, playfulness, grace, and noble bearing? Here hearts are as black as brows, and smiles as treacherous as the adders of the wood. The natives are crafty and remorseless; they never relax; they have no cheerfulness or mirth; their very love is a furnace, and their sole ecstasy is revenge.”

“No country like home to any of us,” said Aristo; “yet here you are. Habit would be a second nature if you were here long enough; your feelings would become acclimated, and would find a new home. People get to like the darkness of the extreme north in course of time. The painted Britons, the Cimmerians, the Hyperboreans, are content never to see the sun at all, which is your god. Here your own god reigns; why quarrel with him?”

“The sun of Greece is light,” answered Callista; “the sun of Africa is fire. I am no fire-worshipper.”

“I suspect even Styx and Phlegethon are tolerable, at length,” said her brother, “if Phlegethon and Styx there be, as the poets tell us.”

“The cold, foggy Styx is the north,” said Callista, “and the south is the scorching, blasting Phlegethon, and Greece, clear, sweet, and sunny, is the Elysian fields.” And she continued her improvisations:—

“Where are the islands of the blest?

They stud the Ægean sea;

And where the deep Elysian rest?

It haunts the vale where Peneus strong

Pours his incessant stream along,

While craggy ridge and mountain bare

Cut keenly through the liquid air,

And, in their own pure tints arrayed,

Scorn earth’s green robes which change and fade,

And stand in beauty undecayed,

Guards of the bold and free.”