r Macrinus demanded
of him he was sure to perform. Whatever longings he might feel to
return to home, he never discovered them; he never sought to gratify
the tastes naturally peculiar to his age. The high priest and his
colleagues were astonished at the extraordinary readiness with which
the boy himself forwarded their intentions for him. Had they known how
elaborately he had been prepared for his future employments at his
father's house, they would have been less astonished at their pupil's
unusual docility. Trained as he had been, he must have shown a more
than human perversity had he displayed any opposition to his uncle's
wishes. He had been permitted no childhood either of thought or
action. His natural precocity had been seized as the engine to force
his faculties into a perilous and unwholesome maturity; and when his
new duties demanded his attention, he entered on them with the same
sincerity of enthusiasm which his boyish coevals would have exhibited
towards a new sport. His gradual initiation into the mysteries of his
religion created a strange, voluptuous sensation of fear and interest
in his mind. He heard the oracles, and he trembled; he attended the
sacrifices and the auguries, and he wondered. All the poetry of the
bold and beautiful superstition to which he was devoted flowed
overwhelmingly into his young heart, absorbing the service of his fresh
imagination, and transporting him incessantly from the vital realities
of the outer world to the shadowy regions of aspiration and thought.

But his duties did not entirely occupy the attention of Ulpius. The
boy had his peculiar pleasures as well as his peculiar occupations.
When his employments were over for the day, it was a strange,
unearthly, vital enjoyment to him to wander softly in the shade of the
temple porticoes, looking down from his great mysterious eminence upon
the populous and sun-brightened city at his feet; watching the
brilliant expanse of the waters of the Nile glittering joyfully in the
dazzling and pervading light; raising his eyes from the fields and
woods, the palaces and garden, that stretched out before him below, to
the lovely and cloudless sky that watched round him afar and above, and
that awoke all that his new duties had left of the joyfulness, the
affectionate sensibility, which his rare intervals of uninterrupted
intercourse with his mother had implanted in his heart. Then, when the
daylight began to wane, and the mo