delay; the shaggy tartar beards had lost all their terrors. These men, who had suddenly displayed “infinite riches in a little room,” must undoubtedly be what they claimed to be; happy the family to which the magicians belonged; the Doge’s Palace need not be afraid to welcome them; they must be set high in the State. Yet the accumulation of treasure was by no means the most noteworthy act of their drama. The Poli had been more than mere traders; from the first they had been diplomatists of a high order. Their career seems to give us the key to some of the wonderful faces that appear in the crowds pictured by Venetian painters, especially those of Carpaccio. They are the faces of men who have met the crisis of life unalarmed, by virtue of a combination of daring and wisdom which is no common possession. They are not cold; if they are severe they are full of feeling--sensitive to the pathos and humour as well as the sternness of reality. The Poli had been obliged to furnish themselves with patience in lands where the transit of a plain is measured in weeks; three years’ residence in a city of Persia is mentioned as a matter of detail. We are not told the reason of delay, only that they could not go before or behind. They had travelled in the true spirit of adventure. On that first journey, when Marco was not of the company, the Great Kaan’s messengers, who came to request an interview for their master, who had never set eyes on a Latin, had found the two brothers open-minded and trustful. They had acquitted themselves well in Cublay’s presence, answering all his questions wisely and in order. He had inquired as to the manners and customs of Europe, and particularly as to Western methods of government and the Christian Church and its Head. He had been “glad beyond measure” at what he had heard of the deeds of the Latins, and decided to send a request to the Christian Apostle for one hundred men learned in the Christian law and the Seven Arts and capable of teaching his people that their household gods were works of the devil and why the faith of the West was better than theirs. The thought of the lamp burning before the sepulchre of God in Jerusalem had stirred his imagination, and he craved some of its oil for the light of his temple, or, maybe, his pleasure dome. So the two Venetians had set out for Europe on his strange embassy. They were provided with a golden tablet on which the Kaan had inscribed orders for the supplying of their needs, food, horses, escorts in all the countries through which they should pass. At the end of three years, after long delays on account of the snows, they arrived at the port of Layas in Armenia, and from Layas they had come to Acre in April of the year 1269. At Acre they had found that Pope Clement IV was dead, and no new election had as yet been made. Venetian history teems with dramatic situations, but it would be difficult to find any stranger than that in which the Polo brothers now found themselves placed.