her you go
to the wild beasts in the Circus."

"They will not eat such as he," observed old Julius Paulinus, and Caesar
nodded approvingly. The Egyptian shuddered, for this imperial nod showed
him by how slender a thread his life hung.

In a flash he reflected whither he might fly if he should fail to find
this hated couple. If, after all, he should discover Melissa alive, so
much the better. Then, he might have been mistaken in identifying the
body; some slave girl might have stolen the bracelet and put it on
before the house was burned down. He knew for a fact that the charred
corpse of which he had spoken was that of a street wench who had
rushed among the foremost into the house of the much-envied imperial
favorite--the traitress--and had met her death in the spreading flames.

Zminis had but a moment to rack his inventive and prudent brain, but he
already had thought of something which might perhaps influence Caesar in
his favor. Of all the Alexandrians, the members of the Museum were those
whom Caracalla hated most. He had been particularly enjoined not to
spare one of them; and in the course of the ride which Caesar, attended
by the armed troopers of Arsinoe, had taken through the streets
streaming with blood, he had stayed longest gazing at the heap of
corpses in the court-yard of the Museum. In the portico, a colonnade
copied from the Stoa at Athens, whither a dozen or so of the
philosophers had fled when attacked, he had even stabbed several with
his own hand. The blood on the sword which Caracalla had dedicated to
Serapis had been shed at the Museum.

The Egyptian had himself led the massacre here, and had seen that it was
thoroughly effectual. The mention of those slaughtered hair-splitters
must, if anything, be likely to mitigate Caesar's wrath; so no sooner
had the applause died away with which the proconsul's jest at his
expense had been received, than Zminis began to give his report of the
great massacre in the Museum. He could boast of having spared scarcely
one of the empty word-pickers with whom the epigrams against Caesar
and his mother had originated. Teachers and pupils, even the domestic
officials, had been overtaken by the insulted sovereign's vengeance.
Nothing was left but the stones of that great institution, which had
indeed long outlived its fame. The Numidians who had helped in the
work had been drunk with blood, and had forced their way even into the
physician's lecture-rooms and the h