al visitor."

"But not here--not in the burial-ground," Melissa urged once more.

Among Glaukias's companions was Argeios, a vain and handsome young poet,
with scented locks betraying him from afar, who was fain to display the
promptness of his poetical powers; and, even while the elder artist was
speaking, he had run Alexander's satirical remarks into the mold of
rhythm. Not to save his life could he have suppressed the hastily
conceived distich, or have let slip such a justifiable claim to applause.
So, without heeding Melissa's remonstrance, he flung his sky-blue mantle
about him in fresh folds, and declaimed with comical emphasis:

"Down to earth did the god cast his son: but with mightier hand
Through it, to Hades, Caesar flung his brother the dwarf."

The versifier was rewarded by a shout of laughter, and, spurred by the
approval of his friends, he declared he had hit on the mode to which to
sing his lines, as he did in a fine, full voice.

But there was another poet, Mentor, also of the party, and as he could
not be happy under his rival's triumph, he exclaimed: "The great
dyer--for you know he uses blood instead of the Tyrian shell--has nothing
of Father Zeus about him that I can see, but far more of the great
Alexander, whose mausoleum he is to visit to-morrow. And if you would
like to know wherein the son of Severus resembles the giant of Macedon,
you shall hear."

He thrummed his thyrsus as though he struck the strings of a lyre, and,
having ended the dumb prelude, he sang:

"Wherein hath the knave Caracalla outdone Alexander?
He killed a brother, the hero a friend, in his rage."

These lines, however, met with no applause; for they were not so lightly
improvised as the former distich, and it was clumsy and tasteless, as
well as dangerous thus to name, in connection with such a jest, the
potentate at whom it was aimed. And the fears of the jovial party were
only too well founded, for a tall, lean Egyptian suddenly stood among the
Greeks as if he had sprung from the earth. They were sobered at once,
and, like a swarm of pigeons on which a hawk swoops down, they dispersed
in all directions.

Melissa beckoned to her brother to follow her; but the Egyptian intruder
snatched the mantle, quick as lightning, from Alexander's shoulders, and
ran off with it to the nearest pine-torch. The young man hurried after
the thief, as he supposed him to be, but there the spy flung the cloak
back to him,