and intolerance combined in command.[3] Yet in spite of factious opposition and ignorant enmity it is probable that the nine years which Napier spent in the Ionian Isles were the happiest of his life. Who can ever measure the enjoyment of these rides over the mountains and through the valleys of that beautiful island? For, with all the practical energy that marked his character, there was a deep poetic instinct in him that made him keenly sensible of the beauty of nature; while his love of reading, continued since boyhood, had stored his retentive memory with the historic traditions of the past. In a memoir on the Roads of Cephalonia, which he published in 1825, there is a description of the valley of Heraclia, lying on the eastern side of the island, which shows how thoroughly he appreciated beauty of scenery, and how well attuned was his mental ear to catch the music of those wondrous memories which float for ever around the isles and shores and seas of Greece. But if Cephalonia held for Charles Napier some of the pleasantest memories of life, so did his period of residence in the island mark his final separation from many loved companions of youth. In 1826 his mother died, and the long and most affectionate correspondence which had lasted from the early Celbridge days came to an end. Never indeed was her image to fade from his memory. To the last it was to remain with him, undimmed by distance or by time, coming to him in weary hours of trouble and disappointment, of glory and success; and as at his side in battle he always wore his father's sword, so in his heart he carried the memory of his mother, whose "beauteous face seemed to smile upon me," he tells us, in the most anxious moments of his Scindian warfare. In 1830 Napier's Ionian service came to an end. He was recalled. It was the old story. Multiplied mediocrity had beaten individual genius. It is not only inevitable, it is even right that it should be so; for by such heating and blowing in the forge of life is the real steel fashioned which has flash and smite in it sufficient to reach us even through the tomb. FOOTNOTE: [3] The gratitude of men for toil and service given to them is not so fleeting as people suppose. "They still speak of Napier in Cephalonia as of a god," said a Greek lady to the writer in this year, 1890. CHAPTER VI OUT OF HARNESS