peradventure, any greater miracle for
the decipherment of these epistles than a hot needle? [*] As for the
supernatural voice, it doth in truth proceed from a respectable, and in
some sense a sacred personage, being mine own when I am concealed within a
certain recess prepared for me by thy lamented predecessor, whose mistress
I was in youth, and whose coadjutor I have been in age. I am now ready to
minister to thee in the latter capacity. Be ruled by me; exchange thy
abject superstition for common sense; thy childish simplicity for discreet
policy; thy unbecoming spareness for a majestic portliness; thy present
ridiculous and uncomfortable situation for the repute of sanctity, and the
veneration of men. Thou wilt own that this is cheap at three hundred
pieces."

[Footnote: Lucian.]

The young priest had hearkened to the crone's discourse with an expression
of the most exquisite distress. When she had finished, he arose, and
disregarding his repulsive companion's efforts to detain him, departed
hastily from the temple.

II

It was the young priest's purpose, as soon as he became capable of forming
one, to place the greatest possible distance between himself and the city
of Dorylaeum. The love of roaming insensibly grew upon him, and ere long
his active limbs had borne him over a considerable portion of Asia. His
simple wants were easily supplied by the wild productions of the country,
supplemented when needful by the proceeds of light manual labour. By
degrees the self-contempt which had originally stung him to desperation
took the form of an ironical compassion for the folly of mankind, and the
restlessness which had at first impelled him to seek relief in a change of
scene gave place to a spirit of curiosity and observation. He learned to
mix freely with all orders of men, save one, and rejoiced to find the
narrow mysticism which he had imbibed from his previous education gradually
yielding to contact with the great world. From one class of men, indeed, he
learned nothing--the priests, whose society he eschewed with scrupulous
vigilance, nor did he ever enter the temples of the Gods. Diviners, augurs,
all that made any pretension whatever to a supernatural character, he held
in utter abhorrence, and his ultimate return in the direction of his native
country is attributed to his inability to persevere further in the path he
was following without danger of encountering Chaldean soothsayers, or
Persian magi,