but closely built towns and widely extended, tall palaces of innumerable rooms, passages, and courts. There were no great stone colonnades or sculptured walls. The few stone columns that remain, with indications that there

at

repose, their avoidance of symmetrical design, or their free, unconventionalized way of using in their decorative work motives in large part unknown to other ancient artists, especially marine objects-rocks and seaweed, shells and corals, the octopus, the nautilus, and the flying-fish. To understand all this, to see how often they passed, notably in their gemengraving, from the naturalistic to the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, and, again, to realize the vigorous, lively, and, as it seems to us, secular spirit of their figure compositions, one must look at the things themselves, if not at the originals in the museum at Candia, then at the faithful reproductions owned by the Metropolitan Museum and the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, or at least at the illustrations in such books as Hall's "Ægean Archæology" and Baikie's "The Seakings of Crete." These books, I may add, deepen the interest of the things they describe by showing how they suggest actualities that were dimly reflected, exaggerated, poetized, transfigured, in the myths and legends of historic Greece.

what the Ægean goldsmith could do, and there is proof that he did as well in the mother island at a much earlier time. In decorated pottery the Cretan did much better than the Egyptian, and almost the cnly things that he seems to have cared to make impressive by reason of their size are his jars of pottery and of stone.

It is impossible, of course, to paint in words the preference of the Cretans for the rendering of movement rather than

The love of the actual, the lack of idealizing impulse, that marks the Cretan artist shows in the non-plastic attire of his figures, astonishingly unlike all our quondam ideas of "the antique." The abnormally small waists of the men and their high boots, or puttees, persist, we are told, in the Crete of to-day, but not the bellshaped, many-flounced, embroidered skirts of the women, the aprons, the little "Zouave jackets," the long curls, and the constricted waists that, except for the fact that the jackets leave the breasts uncovered, so amazingly, so amusingly suggest the fashions of our own Civil War period. Barring the tall crown, it is this customary Cretan dress that the snake goddess wears. The gold borders of her flounces are ornamented each with a different pattern delicately incised. The jacket is barely discernible now, and probably was completed with color. A series of holes shows where either an apron or an ornament of some sort was attached to the front of the skirt. Others indicate that there was once a gold necklace as well as a gold band around the crown. And the holes above the forehead must have been for the attaching of little gold curls such as may be seen on the fragment of another ivory head. It is a curious point that, while the rest of the body is most delicately modeled, the nipples are formed by gold pins.

VERY unlike a goddess seems this little personage to eyes accustomed to the deities of Egypt and of Greece; yet no portrayal of a deity more nearly akin to these has been discovered in Crete.

More may be known about the religion of the Cretans if their well-developed forms of writing are ever deciphered. We know now that they worshiped in sacred caves and at shrines in their palaces and houses, where many votive figures and emblems have been found. The bull was a sacred animal, and there may have been a religious significance in those animated frescos of bull-baitings which, with lithe young figures vaulting over the bulls, appear to us so frankly secular. Evidently the Cretan pantheon was very limited. Certainly the chief divinity was a goddess, the great mother who typified the powers and mysteries of nature and was the source and guardian of all life, a divinity of the same character as Rhea, the mother of the

gods, whom the later Greeks imagined as having sought refuge in Crete to be delivered of her son Zeus. This goddess the Cretans represented with varying attributes and accompaniments according as they wished to suggest one or another phase of her power over the forces of nature; with the sacred pillar or tree, for example, with doves, with lions, or with snakes.

What the snake typified in Cretan mythology we do not know, and we should profit little by considering its place in other cults with which the Cretan may have had few analogies. The fact that certain of the female figures with snakes that have been found in Cretan places of worship seem to be merely votaries of the goddess or simple snake-charmers has led some critics to deny that any of them are goddesses. But the weight of opinion recognizes a divinity in those that are posed with dignity and wrought with exceptional care and skill, and such preëminently is our ivory example. No other that we know compares with it in the preciousness of the material, in the beauty of the workmanship, or in the impression of stateliness and power which, despite its small size, it conveys. Once our eyes are accustomed to the garb, which seems less strange when we think of the deities of lands that lay farther toward the east than Egypt and Greece, we feel that this determined, dominating air-an air that is also singularly proud and aristocraticbefits no mere votary or temple attendant.

Actual movement the Cretans could render with wonderful success, as in certain exquisitely modeled ivory figures, about a foot in length, of youths leaping through the air-probably parts of a bullbaiting group-which from the technical point of view deserve to rank with the snake goddess. But in the snake goddess herself the sculptor has mastered, with great beauty of line, another problem almost as difficult. He has combined the vigor of suggested action with the dignity of repose. How solidly the figure stands on its feet and, without any violence of gesture, expresses by its pose the effort needed to balance the weight and resistance of the living serpents! Nor could increase of size augment the forcefulness of the hand, anatomically correct in its modeling, or the realistic vividness of the face.

This tiny face, five eighths of an inch in length from the hair to the tip of the chin, no larger than a lady's finger-nail, is the most remarkable part of the statuette. Fortunately, it is well preserved. The cracks do not touch the features, and only the left eye and a portion of the forehead and the left cheek are otherwise injured. Part of the nose was, indeed, broken off, but has been put in place again without altering the line of the profile, and the mouth is intact. Look at the uninjured right eye, smaller than this capital O, and you will see what no Greek sculptor achieved before the greatest days of Hellenic art-an eye modeled with fidelity to nature, properly sunk beneath the brow, and with the lower eyelid set farther back than the upper. A drilled hole indicates the pupil.

Still more interesting, still more surprising, than the beauty of the workmanship is the type of the head, for it is unlike any other in any material, sculptured or painted, that has been found in Crete, the customary Cretan type resembling, with certain differences, what we call the Grecian or classic. Nor anywhere else in ancient art do we find its analogue. A face with such a profile as this and this mouth with drooping corners seems modern indeed-a face that we might expect to see

on the street in Boston rather than behind the glass of a cabinet of antiquities.

But although no parallel to this head is yet known to us, it stands with many other Cretan things as curiously suggestive of the things of to-day. Twenty years ago we should have found it no harder to imagine an ancient sculptor producing a profile like that of the snake goddess than to fancy, for example, an ancient painter using in his mural decorations plant-motives treated as naturalistically and unsymmetrically as though they were Japanese.

No reproduction can explain the exquisite workmanship or the individuality or the charm of this little face. Even a photograph of the same size coarsens it and transmutes the intent expression into a sort of mournful anxiety that does not speak from the original. And while an enlargement is instructive as emphasizing the peculiarities of the type, it must seem a brutal exaggeration to any one who knows the delicate high-bred beauty of the head itself.

In a far time and a far land this wonderful little lady has found a new home amid new devotees who, if for other reasons, will prize and guard her as piously as did those to whom she came fresh from the hands of a master sculptor thirty-five centuries ago. But how we wish that we might see her as she was then-proud and dainty, her dress unharmed and doubtless touched with brilliant color, her golden adornments glistening, her flesh unscarred, and her complexion smooth and fair!

I

times when, to the man, a woman's appetite is the last straw. She was tired, she

the house down."

"You are not?" Joseph Cameron, bewildered, laid his paper upon his knees and squinted up at his wife.

"No, Joe, I am not." As if it absorbed her, and no one could have said that it did not, for she kept house beautifully, Nellie straightened an etching; then quietly she walked out of the room.

She went into their bedroom and closed the door. After a while Cameron, watching warily, saw her come into the hall again in a peach-colored dress that he particularly liked her in; saw her go down the hall, away from him and she had a very good back-to the nursery door, the warm, cheerful firelight falling full upon her face, her hands, her softly glowing dress. Billy, their only son, just learning to walk, toddled to meet her. Cameron saw the chubby hands rumple her skirts, saw Nellie stoop and swing him high with her firm arms, then drop him to his place upon her breast. The door closed, the hall was shadowy again, the apartment as still as a place marked "To Let."

was

The dinner was on time and excellent; Nellie, decorative and chatty, promptly in her place. Dinner over, they went to the sitting-room for their coffee. The apartment was very high up, the windows looking over the tree-tops of the drive, across the Hudson to the Jersey shore. It was March, and the shore lights wavered in gusts of rain that threatened to turn to snow. The room was warm; Cameron was suffocating; Nellie was serenely unaware. She had eaten well, from her soup through her cheese. There are

"Going out to-night, Joey?"

"Yes. Bridge hand around at Gordon's. Want a talk with Gordon about a matter of business."

"I like having things to do in the afternoon, but when night comes" - Nellie smothered a contented yawn-"I love getting into something comfy, and just buzzing round our own lamp."

"I must own that I have never found afternoon diversions to be diverting." Το save him he could not keep his voice goodnatured. He had had a grind of a day, and was dog-tired; it seemed to him that she ought to know it and talk about it.

"Yes?" Nellie mused. "It was amusing at the club to-day-the Nondescripts." She laughed softly. "It was n't 'nondescript' to-day, though!"

"Some old maid telling you to bring your children up on the county, and throw your husbands out of their jobs?"

"What, Joey?" Nellie seemed to bring her thoughts back from a long way off. "Old maid? I should say not! We had a man. We nearly always do. Then everybody comes, and there 's more glow. He was an English socialist-I guess he was a socialist. Burne-Jones hair, and a homespun jacket, -loose, and all that,and a heavy ribbon on his glasses. He talked about the new man."