"I had laid in a stock of writing-materials before I went up on the mountain, and I now went to work with great enthusiasm to set down what I knew of the expedition of Xerxes, and here it was that I made the notes which were afterward so useful to Herodotus.
"When the country became quieter I went down into the plains, looked over the battle-fields, and obtained a great deal of information from the villagers and country people. I stayed here nearly two years, and had a pretty hard time of it; but when I went away I took with me a very valuable collection of notes.
"For many years I made no use of these notes; but being in Halicarnassus, I heard of Herodotus, who was described as a great scholar and traveler, and engaged in writing history. To him I applied without loss of time, and I made a regular engagement, working several hours with him every day. For this he paid me weekly a sum equal to about two dollars and seventy-five cents of our present money; but it was enough to support me, and I was very glad to have the opportunity of sending some of my experiences and observations down into history. It was at this time that the love of literary work began to arise within me, and in the next three or four centuries after the death of Herodotus I wrote a number of books on various subjects and under various names, and some of these, as I mentioned before, were destroyed with the Alexandrian Library.
"It was in this period that I made the acquaintance of an editor--the first editor, in fact, of whom I know anything at all. I was in Rhodes, and there was a learned man there named Andronicus, who was engaged in editing the works of Aristotle. All the manuscripts and books which that great philosopher left behind him had been given to a friend, or trustee, and had passed from this person into the possession of others, so that for about a hundred years the world knew nothing of them. Then they came into the hands of Andronicus, who undertook to edit them and get them into proper shape for publication. I went to Andronicus, and as soon as he found I was a person qualified for such work, he engaged me as his assistant editor. I held this position for several years, and two or three of the books of Aristotle I transcribed entirely with my own hand, properly shaping sentences and paragraphs, and very often making the necessary divisions. From my experience with Andronicus, I am sure that none of the works of Aristotle were given to the world exactly as he wrote them, for we often found his manuscript copies very rough and disjointed so far as literary construction is concerned, but I will also say that we never interfered with his philosophical theories or his scientific statements and deductions."
"In all that time thee never married?" asked Mrs. Crowder.
Crowder and I could not help laughing.
"I did not say so," said he, "but I will say that, with one exception, I do not remember any interesting matrimonial alliances which occurred during the period of my literary labors. I married a young woman of Rhodes, and gave her a very considerable establishment, which I was able to do, for Andronicus paid me much better than Herodotus had done; but she did not prove a very suitable helpmeet, and I believe she married me simply because I was in fairly good circumstances. She soon showed that she preferred a young man to an elderly student, the greater part of whose time was occupied with books and manuscripts, and we had not been married a year when she ran away with a young goldsmith, and disappeared from Rhodes, as I discovered, on a vessel bound for Rome. I resigned myself to my loss, and did not even try to obtain news of her. I was too much engrossed in my work to be interested in a runaway wife.
"It was a little more than half a century after this that I was in Rome and sitting on the steps of one of the public buildings in the Forum. I was waiting to meet some one with whom I had business, and while I sat there an old woman stopped in front of me. She was evidently poor, and wretchedly dressed; her scanty hair was gray, and her face was wrinkled and shrunken. I thought, of course, she was a beggar, and was about to give her something, when she clasped her hands in front of her and exclaimed, 'How like! How like! How like!' 'Like whom?' said I. 'What are you talking about?' 'Like your father,' she said, 'like your father! You are so like him, you resemble him so much in form and feature, in the way you sit, in everything, that you must be his son!' 'I have no doubt I am my father's son,' said I, 'and what do you know about him?' 'I married him,' she said. 'For nearly a year I was his wife, and then I foolishly ran away and left him. What became of him I know not, nor how long he lived, but he was a great deal older than I was, and must have passed away many years ago. But thou art his image. He had the same ruddy face, the same short white hair, the same broad shoulders, the same way of crossing his legs as he sat. He must have married soon after I left him. Tell me, whom did he marry? What was thy mother's name?' I gave her the name of my real mother, and she shook her head. 'I never heard of her,' she said. 'Did thy father ever speak of me, a wife who ran away from him?' 'Yes; he has spoken of you--that is, if you are Zalia, the daughter of an oil-merchant of Rhodes?'
"'I am that woman,' she exclaimed, 'I am that woman! And did he mourn my loss?'