A few isolated houses, with no pretense to comfort or to charm, a sort of villas, are to be found upon the quarter of mile of flat by the seashore, and one or two stand on the rise of the little height. Between them, for here a hundred yards and here two hundred, and all around them for half a mile and a mile again, is dry, burnt, dirty land, brown in summer, and empty save for here and there some tufts of coarse grass. Far off, in two great horns or arms leading to the horizon, run the mountain promontories that enclose this bay like a pocket--a side pocket of the sea. A tramway, come from Tunis and spanning the lagoon upon the embankment, runs past the base of the hill at the edge of the sea flat. There is a halt rather than a station, a deserted wooden platform without rooms or master. On that platform is the name of the place, “CARTHAGE”; and thus does a man to-day know where it was that the mighty Carthaginian aristocracy stood, where the ships rode innumerable, where Elissa died, and where the Roman armies, masters at last as armies always are of merchants and the sea, stormed yard by yard the rise to the Citadel. It was upon this hill and near the summit of it, upon the eastern side which overlooks the water below, at a spot just in front of the place where the Saracens had built out of the blocks of Carthaginian ruin a castle of their own, that the King of France lay dying. He was in his splendid tent, the baking air within hardly relieved by the lifting of its side and the spraying of water on the canvas. With him were his sons, and round that poor camp-bed were the many men of his house. It was the day after St. Bartholomew’s feast, an awful day of heat in August, when the distant blue of the promontory hills trembled in the air, and when the iron of men’s accoutrements, the rings of the saddle and of the bridle, were burning to the hand, and the baked earth of that low hill camp scorching to the feet. St. Louis, who thus lay feeble in the last moments of his life, was but fifty-five years of age, nor did even these years fit him well, for his face had always something boyish in it and too tender for the approach of age. But the coming of death was clearly imprinted upon his pinched features, his lips without blood, and the droop of his mouth after so many days of pain. Before his voice fell low, while he yet had the power, he already had ordered a layer of ashes to be spread--as custom was then with pious rich men, that they might pass the more humbly. He said that Philip, his son, who was to reign after him, should be sent to him. This soldier was also weak from illness, but he came; and when that lord had come St. Louis said from his bed many things to this his heir, which things he ordered to be put down in writing as he spoke them, and to be kept as a testament for the governing of the realm of France, of which, years before, he had said to this same son as a child,--