d creatures with a soul and language of their own. When
she folded them devoutly together it seemed as if they were putting up a
mute prayer. She was pliant in form as a young palm-tree when it bends,
and withal she had a noble dignity, even on the occasion when I first saw
her.

"It was a hideous spot, the revolting prison-hall of Rhyakotis. She wore
only a threadbare robe that had once been costly, and a foul old woman
followed her about--as a greedy rat might pursue an imprisoned dove--and
loaded her with abusive language. She answered not a word, but large
heavy tears flowed slowly over her pale cheeks and down on to her hands,
which she kept crossed on her bosom. Grief and anguish spoke from her
eyes, but no vehement passion deformed the regularity of her features.
She knew how to endure even ignominy with grace, and what words the
raging old woman poured out upon her!

"I had long since been baptized, and all the prisons were open to me, the
rich Menander, the brother-in-law of the prefect--those prisons in which
under Maximin so many Christians were destined to be turned from the true
faith.

"But she did not belong to us. Her eye met mine, and I signed my forehead
with the cross, but she did not respond to the sacred sign. The guards
led away the old woman, and she drew back into a dark corner, sat down,
and covered her face with her hands. A wondrous sympathy for the hapless
woman had taken possession of my soul; I felt as if she belonged to me,
and I to her, and I believed in her, even when the turnkey had told me in
coarse language that she had lived with a Roman at the old woman's, and
had defrauded her of a large sum of money. The next day I went again to
the prison, for her sake and my own; there I found her again in the same
corner that she had shrunk into the day before; by her stood her prison
fare untouched, a jar of water and a piece of bread.

"As I went up to her, I saw how she broke a small bit off the thin cake
for herself, and then called a little Christian boy who had come into the
prison with his mother, and gave him the remainder. The child thanked her
prettily, and she drew him to her, and kissed him with passionate
tenderness, though he was sickly and ugly.

"'No one who can love children so well is wholly lost,' said I to myself,
and I offered to help her as far as lay in my power.

"She looked at me not without distrust, and said that nothing had
happened to her, but what she deserve