[Illustration: WE’LL GIVE YOU THE TITLE OF MPRET OF POLAND
The new Governor has had the title of Mpret given to him, the same that
was given to the ill-starred Prince of Wied when made ruler of Albania
in 1914.]
II--“Sisyphus,--his Stone”
Sisyphus, as the story goes, was a King who widely extended the
commerce, and largely increased the wealth, of Corinth, but by
avaricious and fraudful ways; for the sin whereof he was sentenced
after death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus,
a huge unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill
top, for all his efforts, rolls down again. In classical representation
of the scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus,
who, presuming too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death
afflicted with an unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and
pellucid lakes--like the lakes of “The Thirst of the Antelope” in
the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia--that ever elude
his anguished approaches; and with Ixion, the meanest and basest of
cheats, and most demoniac of murderers, whose posthumous punishment
was in being stretched, and broken, and bound, in the figure of the
svastika, on a wheel which, self-moved--like the wheels of the vision
of Ezekiel--whirls for evermore round and round the abyss of the nether
world. The moral of these tortures is that we may well and most wisely
leave vengeance to “the high Gods.” They will repay!