ead of a tipsy
crew, and pointing with his thyrsus to the dark, undecorated house, had
shouted:

"Look at that dismal barrack! All that the Jew used to spend on
decorating the street, he is saving up now in his money chest!" The words
were like a spark among tinder and others followed.

"The niggard is robbing our father Dionysus," cried a second citizen, and
a third, flourishing his torch on high, croaked out:

"Let us get at the drachmae he grudges the god; we can find a use for
them." Graukus, the sausage maker, snatched from his neighbor's hand the
bunch of tow soaked in pitch, and bellowed out, "I advise that we should
burn the house over their heads!"

"Stay, stay," cried a cobbler who worked for Apollodorus' slaves, as he
placed himself in the butcher's way. "Perhaps they are mourning for some
one in there. The Jew has always decorated his house on former
occasions."

"Not they," replied a flute-player in a loud hoarse voice. "We met the
old miser's son on the Bruchiom with some riotous comrades and
misconducted hussies, with his purple mantle fluttering far behind him."

"Let us see which is reddest, the Tyrian stuff or the blaze we shall make
if we set the old wretch's house on fire," shouted a hungry-looking
tailor, looking round to see the effects of his wit.

"Ay! let us try!" rose from one man, and then, from a number of others:

"Let us get into the house!"

"The mean churl shall remember this day!"

"Fetch him out!"

"Drag him into the street!"

Such shouts as these rose here and there from the crowd, which grew
denser every instant as it was increased by fresh tributaries attracted
by the riot.

"Drag him out!" again shrieked an Egyptian slavedriver, and a woman
shrieked an echo of his words. She snatched the deer-skin from her
shoulders, flourished it round and round in the air above her tangled
black hair, and bellowed furiously:

"Tear him in pieces!"

"In pieces, with your teeth!" roared a drunken Maenad who, like most of
the mob that had collected, knew nothing whatever of the popular grudge
against Apollodorus and his house.

But words had already begun to be followed by deeds. Feet, fists, and
cudgels stamped, drubbed, and thumped against the firmly-bolted brazen
door of the darkened house, and a ship's boy of fourteen sprang on the
shoulders of a tall black slave and tried to climb the roof of the
colonnade, and to fling the torch which the sausage-maker handed up to
him int