“This is Pluto’s own realm,” declared Jane, removing her nose from the window-pane, through which she had been endeavouring to peer into the outer gloom. “If it’s not the very threshold of the infernal regions it ought to be. Peripatetica, you might spare me a glimmer or two from your Baedeker. Were there no temples to Pluto here? These are surely the very surroundings in which he should have been worshipped.” 193“A temple to Pluto?” replied Peripatetica sleepily. “Where?... I never heard of one that I can remember; have you?” Jane suddenly realized that her recollections held no account of any spot where that dark King of the Under World had been honoured under the sun; it was another mystery of the past, to which there was no answer, though Peripatetica gave up her nap in the effort to solve it—why had Pluto, supreme in the Under World as Zeus in the Upper one, beneath whose sway all men born must come, remained so unhonoured among living men? The Greeks did believe in a future life; the spirit expiating or rewarded for deeds done in the flesh. Those were facts which men thought they knew, which were an integral axis of their faith—how so believing, did they treat it thus unconcernedly, seeing things in such different proportions from ourselves? So much concern for the fulness of life in the present, so little for the shadowy hereafter—shrines and temples and sacrifices on every hillside to the Deities of Life, of Birth, and Fertility; nothing for the God of Death. Death and Life—they touched as closely in ancient days as now, perhaps more closely. The Greeks did not push away their dead to a dim, silent oblivion. Near to the warm heart of life they were held in bright, oft-invoked memory. In the busiest centres of life were placed the tombs of their dead; close to the theatre—to the Forum—wherever the living most thronged the Road of Tombs was; one where all the busiest tide of life flowed. Invocations and offerings and sweet ceremonies of remembrance were given to their dead more often than tears. And constantly the 194living turned to the dear and honoured dead—“much frequented” was the Greek adjective which went oftenest with the tomb. But the grim God of Death was apparently not for living man to make his spirit “sick and sorry” by worshipping. It was Life—glorious, glowing fulness of life to the uttermost—that was important to the Greek; Life that governed Death and made it either honoured and reposeful, or a state of shadowy wanderings and endless regret. To the modern mind, still tinged with mediæval morbidity, groping back into the clear serenity of those golden days, it seemed to be life, life, only life that preoccupied the Greeks, and yet, they too had hearts to feel Death’s sting even as we—to be aware of the underlying sadness of all the joy upon this rolling world. They too could deeply feel the inexorable mingling of delight and pain, of life and loss....