ear now so close at hand.

The aspect of the palace at Lochias was entirely changed. In the place
of the gay little gate-house stood a large tent of gorgeous purple
stuff, in which the Emperor's body-guard was quartered, and opposite to
it another was pitched for lictors and messengers. The stables were full
of horses. Hadrian's own horse, Borysthenes, which had had too long a
rest, pawed and stamped impatiently in a separate stall, and close at
hand the Emperor's retrievers, boar-hounds and harriers were housed in
hastily-contrived yards and kennels.

In the wide space of the first court soldiers were encamped, and
close under the walls squatted men and women--Egyptians, Greeks and
Hebrews--who desired to offer petitions to the sovereign. Chariots drove
in and out, litters came and went, chamberlains and other officials
hurried hither and thither. The anterooms were crowded with men of the
upper classes of the citizens who hoped to be granted audience by the
Emperor at the proper hour. Slaves, who offered refreshments to those
who waited or stood idly looking on, were to be seen in every room, and
official persons, with rolls of manuscript under their arms, bustled
into the inner rooms or out of the palace to carry into effect the
orders of their superior.

The hall of the Muses had been turned into a grand banqueting-hall.
Papias, who was now on his way to Italy by the Emperor's command, had
restored the damaged shoulder of the Urania. Couches and divans stood
between the statues, and under a canopy at the upper end of the vast
room stood a throne on which Hadrian sat when he held audience. On these
occasions he always appeared in the purple, but in his writing-room,
which he had not changed for another, he laid aside the imperial mantle
and was no more splendid in his garb than the architect Claudius Venator
had been.

In the rooms that had belonged to the deceased Keraunus now dwelt an
Egyptian without wife or children--a stern and prudent man who had
done good service as house-steward to the prefect Titianus, and the
living-room of the evicted family now looked dreary and uninhabited. The
mosaic pavement which had indirectly caused the death of Keraunus, was
now on its way to Rome, and the new steward had not thought it worth
while to fill up the empty, dusty, broken-up place which had been left
in the floor of his room by the removal of the work of art, nor even to
cover it over with mats. Not a single cheerfu