On the evening of her
arrival she climbed the little height at the back of her domain and
looked southward, down a sheer wall of rock eight or nine hundred feet
high, over the wrinkled ocean. It made her feel queer. Further
familiarity with the precipice did not breed contempt; her visits to
the site became rarer and rarer. She died, at a patriarchal age, in her
bed, after writing a scholarly pamphlet to prove that the tale of
Sappho's leap over her famous silvery crag was a myth, the "purest
sensationalism," a fable of the grammarians "hopelessly irreconcilable
with what we know of that great woman's character."
This much the bishop had learnt from Mr. Keith. That gentleman liked
the Sappho story; he called it absolutely true to human nature and so
creditable to the old lady's intelligence that he would have insisted
upon paying his respects to her had she not expired a good many years
before his arrival on the island. And he, of course, got it from Eames
who, as annotator of Perrelli's ANTIQUITIES, was in the habit of
garnering old details anent private houses and so forth, and had
possessed himself, in the course of his researches, of this particular
pamphlet which he intended to reprint, together with others of its
kind, in an appendix entitled, "Contemporary Social History.
Pages:
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168