I assured him earnestly that few things would give me greater satisfaction, whereupon he presented me with a sesterce of the Roman period bearing on its face in high relief a portrayal of a chariot drawn by four horses; one of the very sesterces, it pleases me to think, which were flung into the arena of the Circus to reward the famous charioteer Scorpianus, the Pop Geers of his time. I carry it in my purse, along with a coin of Alexander the Great which I picked up in Macedonia, and another, minted during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, which I acquired in Babylon. They serve to remind me, these tiny pieces of silver, that there have been other civilizations than those epitomized by Fifth Avenue and Piccadilly and the Rue de la Paix; that there were great cities, mighty empires, culture, luxury, in those dim and far-off days when history was beginning and the world was very young. Before he would say good-by Father Delattre insisted on presenting us with his picture, to obtain which he ran as nimbly as a boy up the steep Byrsa Hill on which the monastery of the Pères Blancs stands. With my fountain-pen he wrote his name across it; then we shook hands with the grand old man and stepped into the waiting car. “Just a moment,” I said to Harvey, as we breasted the brow of the plateau and the road to Tunis unrolled its twenty kilometers like a lariat tossed idly upon the ground. “Stop the car. I wish to take a final look.” Standing in the tonneau, I looked down upon that stage on which has been enacted so much of the history of the world—the little bay where Dido landed; the harbor in which the galleys of Hamilcar were moored; the slopes up which the legionaries of Scipio fought their bloody way; the site of the Amphitheater in which the martyrs died; the traces of the Forum which was turned into a stable by Genseric’s Vandal horsemen; the rolling plain across which surged behind their green standards the Moslem hordes of Hassan; the little knoll on which St. Louis pitched his final camp.... “_Sic transit gloria mundi_,” I thought. But my reflections were rudely interrupted as, with a great wheezing and puffing, a little covered motor-van came rocking toward us. It was driven by a fresh-faced, blue-eyed youngster in khaki trousers and a flannel shirt, bare of head and neck and arm. Beside him on the narrow seat sat two other youngsters similarly clad. They waved their hands in friendly fashion and shouted greetings to us in our own language. As the car plunged past on its way to Carthage we could see the legend, painted in staring black on its gray sides: DEPARTMENT OF ARCHÆOLOGY CARTHAGINIAN SECTION UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR, U. S. A. CHAPTER VII TO KAIROUAN THE HOLY