ood food, walking
miles round and round the big courtyard under the empty arcades,
exercising in the gymnasium of the Choragium, steaming and parboiling and
half-roasting myself in its small but very well-appointed and well-served
baths, and, otherwise, reading every bit of my daylight. I kept well and I
remained safe, ignored and unnoticed. The procurator kept his word as to
shielding me from visitors, and he said he had much ado to succeed, for
the ease and certitude with which, in the open arena, before all Rome, I
approached a lion or tiger which had just slaughtered a criminal and
lapped his blood, seized the beast by the mane or scruff of the neck, as
if he had been a tame dog, and led him to a postern or into his cage,
roused much interest, much curiosity, many enquiries and not a little
desire to see me closer, question me, talk with me, get acquainted with me
and learn the secret of my power.

I thanked the procurator for his resolution and success in rebuffing
would-be patrons eager to pamper me. Also, all winter, I dreaded that he
would he less lucky or less adamantine when spring came.

Thus passed my fourth winter since my disaster.

I might have been spared much of my anxiety during the winter if I had
learned sooner that such aloofness as mine was no novelty to the
procurator, that he had, among his most valued subordinates, a man even
more unsociable than I, and even more highly esteemed and more sedulously
pampered. This was the celebrated and regretted Spaniard, Mercablis, who,
for more than thirty years, was accorded by the Choragium a home of his.
own, a retinue of servants and the fulfillment of every whim, of which the
chief was his determination to have as little as possible to do with any
human being except his wife and their three children, for he was not a
slave, but a freeman. In his way Mercablis was as celebrated as Felix
Bulla the brigand or Agyllius Septentrio the actor of mimes, and the
memory of his fame yet lingers in the recollections of the aged and in the
talk of their children and grandchildren. For it was Mercablis who, for
half a life-time, invented, rehearsed, and kept secret till the moment of
its display the noon-hour sensational surprise for each day of games in
the Colosseum.

I have, in my later years, met many persons who congratulated me on my
luck in having personally known and frequently talked with Mercablis, just
as many have similarly envied me my encounters with F