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The dark clouds which hung over the hills, gave us little time to look upon the singular scene; and we were soon comfortably settled in the half-barbaric, half-Asiatic city, with a pleasant prospect of seeing its wonders on the morrow. Prague. I feel as if out of the world, in this strange, fantastic, yet beautiful old city.
Moreover, as the untutored, half-barbaric, impulsive young heart of Cigarette had felt, so felt the high-bred, cultured, world-wise mind of Venetia Corona that this man's exile was no shame, but some great sacrifice; a sacrifice whose bitterness smote her with its own suffering, whose mystery wearied her with its own perplexity, as she gazed down the line of the regiments to where the shot-bruised Eagle of Zaraila gleamed above the squadrons of the Chasseurs d'Afrique.
Thus conversing, their steps were arrested by a crowd gathered round an open space where three streets met; and, just where the porticoes of a light and graceful temple threw their shade, there stood a young girl, with a flower-basket on her right arm, and a small three-stringed instrument of music in the left hand, to whose low and soft tones she was modulating a wild and half-barbaric air.
If this be so, we must bear with her romance, remembering that, at all events, romance serves to elevate, while realism tends undoubtedly toward deterioration. Catrina hated Etta Sydney Bamborough with a simple half-barbaric hatred because she had gained the love of Paul Alexis. Etta had taken away from her the only man whom Catrina could ever love all through her life.
Like all the line of these half-barbaric, picturesque dukes, Charles could not disassociate himself from magnificence, which in those days took the place of comfort. When making war, he endeavoured to have his camp lodgment as near as possible reproduce the elegance of his home. In his campaign against Switzerland, his tent was entirely hung with the most magnificent of tapestries.
It might be suggested that half-barbaric countries, like Russia or Norway, which have always lain, to say the least of it, on the extreme edge of the circle of our European civilization, have a certain primal melancholy which belongs to them through all the ages. It is highly probable that this sadness, which to us is modern, is to them eternal.
From the cabins in the locust grove would float the tinkling of the banjo, the untrained guffaw of the negro men, and the wild, half-barbaric notes of an old-time melody. And the stars would shine in glory above us, and we would sit on the steps and talk of the things we both loved.
"To get beyond my depth," she interrupted, and she motioned me to a chair. "Well, let it be so," said I. "I was curious to know what kept you in this sylvan, and I fear, to you, half-barbaric spot. I was bored with myself; and I had some purpose in coming, or I should not have had the impulse." She was leaning back in her chair easily, not languidly. She seemed reposeful, yet alert.
This day's incident of the cruise in the Malay Archipelago seems absolutely cut off from ordinary experience a solitary Englishwoman, resting in the shadow of the rustic mosque, and surrounded by a half-barbaric tribe of unfamiliar aspect, the dark woolly hair, flat noses, wide mouths, and dazzling teeth suggesting a liberal admixture of negro or Papuan blood.
The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but the introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo of Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression.
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