The President was not without a sense of the beautiful. The scene around him awakened his imagination. He knew that the wooded slopes of the stately hills, the stone hewn from the inexhaustible quarries, and the broad river--formerly spanned by bridges and aqueducts graceful in outline and noble in proportions--each and all had furnished the means which skilful hands had put to glorious uses. Yet all these ingredients of beauty might have remained unused but for the wonderful thermal waters which here, for untold centuries, had risen ceaselessly from fathomless depths, streaming ever from rocky fissures, filling the pools and natural basins, and still overflowing into the rushing river. But this beneficent spring and these now verdant hills must have had their remote origin in some terrible concussion of natural forces. Mother Earth had laboured and brought them forth, far back in her pre-historic ages. Subterranean fires, begotten by the portentous union of iron and sulphur, had waited their appointed time. Drop after drop, the hidden waters had filtered on inflammable ingredients, until the imprisoned air at last exploded, and the earth, rending and rocking in appalling convulsions, opened enormous chasms and brought forth, amid fire and smoke and vapour, the embryo of all this lovely scene. The City was the offspring of seismic action; the earth had travailed and brought forth these wooded hills. The smiling valley, where now stood the City, was but the crater of an extinct volcano, perpetuated in memory by the steaming waters that still gushed upward from the mystic depths. Below the streets and houses of the modern town were the original baths of the City of Sulcastra, of many acres in extent. Here, indeed, in this most wonderful of Spas, history unfolded itself page by page--the City of Sul in the grip, successively, of Roman, Saxon, Dane; dynasty succeeding dynasty, sovereign coming after sovereign, statesman after statesman, until now, when a Walsall mechanic in a bath-chair was all that England had to show by way of substitute for absolute sovereignty and sceptred sway. And with Nicholas Jardine, too, the relentless law of time was at work. The sceptre was falling from his grasp. The grass withereth; the flower fadeth. Man passes to his long home, and the mourners go about the street. Would it be his turn next? Every day Zenobia seemed to see in her father's face signs of a slowly working change. She witnessed the melancholy spectacle of waning strength, of failing interest in those things that once had absorbed his thoughts and energies. It wrought in her a corresponding change, a protective tenderness which she had never felt before, a deepening sense of the transience and sadness of human pomp and circumstance, a broadened sympathy with all the sons of men.