voyage reach, though sailing a day or two westward toward the strait leading to the unknown ocean, and finding naught to induce a landing. Then straight toward Akko we laid our course, conveying with us to our people new knowledge and many worthy wolfskins! No more need I tell of our increasing trade of far-flung sails. Phœnicia was growing in prosperity as never land had grown before. Yatnan had become Phœnician and we worked its copper mines, and had a temple in its city, Paphos; the fame of Tyre and Sidon was extending throughout the lands of Egypt and the Euphrates, and our ships and caravans carried such wares as might tempt all peoples. As for we three, Aradnus, Malchus, and I, we were now among Phœnicia’s richest men. Of the rest, it appertains chiefly to me alone, and is not as I would have it! Of Elissa, fairest of Paphian women, I have no complaint to make. The gods will judge her, but not the gods whose nostrils fed upon the sacrifice. There was none like unto her in all the Yatnan city, and we inclined to each other, and, after much earnest wooing, she became my wife. Proud I was and prouder still when she bore me a son, lusty and comely, who soon had twined his little fingers round my heartstrings and whom, after the way of doting fathers, I deemed the fairest child in all the world. They were golden days which followed, until I sailed away again upon a voyage--and then came Baal! Of the religion of the Phœnicians I have not yet spoken, and only in rage or shame may one tell of its quality. Of its origin I know nothing save that the great Baal, or Moloch, as one with him, was as the creating and yet burning and destroying sun, and that he must have his worship and his sacrifices. Lightly was this religion held by such as I and the other sea-rovers, in whose faces blew the pure winds of the sea and who had seen and who knew of things beyond wild superstitions, but with the people of the cities and the fierce, unknowing rabble this was not so, and they were under the dominion of priests as bloody-minded and full of frenzy as the savage cannibal creatures who dwelt in distant places. At this time, too, the worship had grown up into an idolatry of the most wanton and abandoned character, and celebrations were made common, ending in wild lascivious orgies wherein men ceased to be men and women no longer women, and wherein, as a beginning, there was burnt great quantities of incense, and bulls and horses were sacrificed in honour of the god, and finally--the horror of it--little children were given to the flames!