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MALLOCK W.
In an enchanted island
page 151 View PDF version of this page towards ourselves may be due to feelings of a warmer and less calculating kind. In one case at least this was so. One patriot's wrath—I tell this for the honour of patriotism—was almost epic and heroic in its origin. The hero was a man renowned for his probity, especially for the severity of what would be called his moral character ; and entering one night a certain house in Nicosia, the fame of which was hardly equal to his own, he was met at the door by a British soldier emerging, who, brimming over with zeal for the honour of England, hit him in the eye out of a sense of pure superiority, exclaiming as he
did so, ' You b y Greek, take that ! ' The Greek's
character was far too spotless to enable him to ex-plain his grievance against the soldier, so he avenged his outraged dignity by opposing the British Govern-ment.
So much moral modesty will be thought doubly remarkable when the surrounding state of society and of opinion is considered. Though the temples of Aphrodite are overthrown and her altars name-less, though shy professors grub in the dust of her scandalous courts and her very name is appro-priated to alien Christian uses, the influence of the goddess is still immortal in the air, and the Bishop
of , when I was in the island, was about, with
a curious appropriateness, to figure as the co-re-spondent in a divorce case. That, no doubt, was a scandal, but a mild scandal only. Another prelate, not very long ago, was said to have a child in every
148
IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND
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