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ago. Just near the end, on her last leave home in the summer of 1925, she did show some slight weakening. "It's lonely out there," she said to me; "I sometimes think I will come home. What shall I do here, I wonder?" The touch of wistfulness and weariness was unlike the old Gertrude. It made me uneasy and set me wondering about her future. I asked her whether she would not consider entering Parliament. In my mind's eye, I saw her "Member for the East" in succession to the late Mark Sykes, in the Government perhaps as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, even as Colonial or Foreign Secretary-who knows? Things move fast. But it did not appeal to her. "I haven't the quickness of thought and speech which could fit the clash of Parliament," she wrote in her last letter to me. "I can do my own job in a way, and explain why I think that the right way of doing it, but I don't cover a wide enough field, and my natural desire is to slip back into the comfortable arena of archæology and history."

She did herself an injustice, I think. I remember some very effective platform speaking in her Anti-Suffrage days (she had supported Mrs. Humphry Ward on that question, when many of us feared that Pankhurst militancy was going to wreck most of what professional women had won) and, in particular, a singularly bold and happy impromptu speech comes vividly back to me in correction of some of Lord Curzon's unfortunate inaccuracies at an Anti-Suffrage meeting. But she hated politics in the narrower sense; what she cared for was the good government of an Eastern people.

No such home-coming was in store for her. In defiance of her doctors at home she had gone back to Iraq in 1925; and, in disobedience to medical advice, there she remained for the summer of 1926, being keenly anxious to get her Museum of Antiquities into good trim before she left it. She had been ill with pneumonia during the winter and this had left her heart weak, but her indomitable spirit kept her going. On that last Sunday (July 11) she had been bathing and went to bed early, telling Marie, her maid, to call her at 6 a. m. next day. Marie was uneasy about her. She went in once to her room that night and found her sleeping; but when at 6 o'clock she tried to rouse her, Gertrude was lying dead; she had gone in her sleep some three hours before.

They buried her there with a great public funeral. The Arabs followed her in their thousands. Never, so the Civil Commissioner wrote, had there been such grief at the passing of an Englishwoman. Here in the House of Commons tribute was paid to a great public servant. Some people were puzzled. They had known so little about her. She never advertised herself, she appeared so seldom on platforms. But to the small circle who know the Near East and its problems, Gertrude Bell will always stand out as a great, unique personality. "Some power in her,” wrote The Times in a leading article devoted to her on the day her death was announced, "linked her deep love of the East with a practical aim that became a dominating purpose. . . . That she endured drudgery, was never dismayed by continual disappointment and never allowed her idealism to turn to bitterness, shows a strength of character rare indeed among those of the English for whom the East has become a passion. She was the one distinguished woman among them and her quality was of the purest English mettle. Miss Bell has left the memory of a great Englishwoman."

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A SCHOLAR OF CALABRIA

BY GERTRUDE SLAUGHTER

I

WE had left the crowd-jostled streets of Rome to meet the spring in southern Italy-that quiet corner of the world which Horace loved, which "more than all others smiled back at him". We had fancied the hills and valleys still peopled with Virgil's singing shepherds. Some trace there might even be of that instinct for dramatic music which inspired the poet Arion, who sailed from that shore, to be miraculously saved from shipwreck, according to the legend, and carried to safety on a dolphin's back that he might transplant on Grecian soil the earliest form of the drama.

Travelling east and north from Reggio in a slow train along the coast of Calabria, we still nourished our hope in spite of the scars of volcanoes, of devastation by earthquake, and of the drearier symptoms of perennial disease. But when we arrived at our first destination, the site of one of the most splendid of Greek colonies, our hopes descended with the sun. We found ourselves in a poor little town without grace of form or color, flat, monotonous and dull. The mountains behind the town have been denuded of their forests; the plain between the mountains and the shore is crossed by narrow streams which diminish in summer until they stagnate in their wide beds or sink into the sand. The railroad to which the town clings for its life hides with dingy accessories the roll of waves on a long white beach. Narrow paved streets, rough and treeless, straggle between low, ashen-gray houses. Through some of the streets one catches glimpses of a few olive orchards and fertile fields, which seem to draw away from the town as if fearing its contact. A few bright gardens are all but concealed by walls of brick and plaster. Irregular squares, which must be scorched by the heat of summer and were at this time spotted with puddles after the rains of winter and early spring, were filled with children at play or with sad-looking donkeys resting from

their labors. The children were beautiful; but the extraordinary brilliance of their black eyes is a symptom, we were told, of the dread malaria that infects the plain.

Certainly no secrets of a Golden Age were to be revealed in such a place. No smiling landscape, no spirit of youth, no echoes of Greek song were here. To search for works of art and relics of a rich antiquity seemed a sacrilegious disregard of the needs of the present; they could be only bitter reminders of the cruel destiny of man. We began to be half ashamed of our interest in Magna Græcia. Yet before we left that dead town we had found a new incarnation of the spirit of Greece. Indeed, we were almost convinced that we had found in that unlikely place the homo fortunatus for whom the philosophers of the world have hunted in vain. Poor as the town is, it has its museum, and the museum has its curator. We had been told that there were scholars of a rare type in Calabria, and we had been led to believe that this curator was one of them. But when we entered the hotel on the evening of our arrival, we were disillusioned again. We had imagined him an ascetic and a philosopher, bearing the marks of deep study, worn and somewhat stooped, timid and retiring, with a compensating sweetness in his manner and the joy of self-sacrifice written on his thin face. But this man was tall and straight and robust, cordial and unshrinking in his manner, with a young face and fresh clear eyes. He was ready to talk on any subject. He had his enthusiasms, one soon perceived, and a glint in his eye when he talked of them, but they were not the enthusiasms of a scholar. He was attractive and puzzling. That he could live in those surroundings and retain that buoyancy of manner that in itself was a mystery.

The greeting was hardly over when he said abruptly, putting his hand to an inside pocket, "I have something to show yousomething I have just found." We expected to see a Greek coin or some ancient inscription on gold or ivory. Not at all. It was an old yellow letter, signed Giuseppe Mazzini. "The original!" he exclaimed. "An autograph letter! Only look at it." We read it while he waited. "Is it not wonderful?" he went on. "It is pure Mazzinian doctrine. It is more than his handwriting —it is the soul of the man. Ah, yes, it is indeed a treasure. I

found it in an old book, quite by chance." Reverently he refolded it and put it back in his pocket.

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"So that is what he is!" I said to myself. "He is one of these Mazzinian enthusiasts who blame Mussolini and his Fascisti for a setback to free government. We shall soon hear him declare that Mussolini is ruining humanity." I was wrong. Entering his office the next morning we faced two portraits hanging side by side Mazzini and Mussolini. When we rallied him on the strange companions, he protested that he was perfectly consistent. He showed us his Fascista badge. He was not merely following the party in power; he was strong in his support of the present régime. Mazzini was an ideal, we were led to understand; Mussolini was a fact. He had saved the country; he was rescuing the South from illiteracy, putting Italy's house in order, working for the day when the people should be capable of Mazzini's ideal democracy. But what had all this to do with Magna Græcia?

When he said good night after his first visit at our hotel, offering to be our guide for as long as we would stay, he had not revealed himself to our understanding, but he had piqued our curiosity. He was of middle age, a husband and father, yet the spirit of eternal youth pervaded his personality. It was not alone his versatile mind and varied interests. Something more was needed to explain a mysterious something that lighted his face.

My friend was a northern Italian who had been interested in Calabria ever since she had gone down there to work for the victims of the Messina earthquake. She was also an ardent archæologist, not as a student but as a seeker of beauty wherever it may be found. "I cannot work for humanity," she had said, "unless I also work for art. The two things go together." She was just the person to draw the scholar out. For we soon discovered that it was only when he was sure of sympathy that he would let one into his thoughts at all.

As we followed him about, meeting other people in the town and observing their manner toward him, we made more interesting discoveries about the scholar than about the history and archæology of the place.

If, as Cæsar said, it is better to be first in an Iberian village than second in Rome, the scholar's lot is a fortunate one. For he is

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