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BE SOLVE TO STABT 19 unusual as a tiger tastes blood ; and I felt that I should not be satisfied until I had had a draught of it. Besides, it was still possible that the marble quarries might prove to be valuable ; the belief that they were so, having been the parent of my wish to visit them, was now in its broken condition kept alive by its child ; and it endowed, in my eyes, an impa-tience to be off somewhere with a semblance of sense and meaning which might else have been wanting. Add to this that, in the course of a few weeks, I received two letters from the two chief officials in Cyprus, offering me help and welcome with a cordiality so charming, that, though springing as I knew it did from their own natural kindness, I modestly set down some degrees of its warmth to the well-known pleasure of expecting a new face. Cyprus, therefore, now remained in my mind for a month or so, much as heaven does in the minds of respectable people, as a place I should shortly go to, though I made no preparations for getting there. I went on with mjr visits, I wrote one or two papers on Socialism, and here and there I spoke at a political meeting. In fact, I ate and drank like the people before the Flood, until one day I surprised myself much as Noah surprised his contemporaries ; I entered into the Ark—that is to say, the offices of the Peninsular and Oriental Company—and took my ticket by the overland route for Alexandria. I had already made enquiries as to how Cyprus was to be reached, and, unless I wished to waste time on the road, c 2

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