y like a centipede.'

'And do you recollect, too, the argument which I had once with your
steward about the pickled fish which I brought you from Egypt; and the
way in which, when the jar was opened, the servants shrieked and
ran right and left, declaring that the fish-bones were the spines of
poisonous serpents?'

'The old fellow is as obstinate as ever, I assure you, in his disbelief
in salt water. He torments me continually by asking me to tell him the
story of my shipwreck, and does not believe me after all, though he has
heard it a dozen times. "Sir," he said to me solemnly, after you were
gone, "will that strange gentleman pretend to persuade me that anything
eatable can come out of his great pond there at Alexandria, when every
one can see that the best fountain in the country never breeds anything
but frogs and leeches?"'

As he spoke they left the last field behind them, and entered upon a
vast sheet of breezy down, speckled with shrubs and copse, and split
here and there by rocky glens ending in fertile valleys once thick with
farms and homesteads.

'Here,' cried Synesius, 'are our hunting-grounds. And now for one hour's
forgetfulness, and the joys of the noble art. What could old Homer have
been thinking of when he forgot to number it among the pursuits which
are glorious to heroes, and make man illustrious, and yet could laud in
those very words the forum?'

'The forum?' said Raphael. 'I never saw it yet make men anything but
rascals.'

'Brazen-faced rascals, my friend. I detest the whole breed of lawyers,
and never meet one without turning him into ridicule; effeminate
pettifoggers, who shudder at the very sight of roast venison, when they
think of the dangers by which it has been procured. But it is a cowardly
age, my friend--a cowardly age. Let us forget it, and ourselves.'

'And even philosophy and Hypatia?' said Raphael archly.

'I have done with philosophy. To fight like a Heracleid, and to die like
a bishop, is all I have left--except Hypatia, the perfect, the wise! I
tell you, friend, it is a comfort to me, even in my deepest misery, to
recollect that the corrupt world yet holds one being so divine--'

And he was running on in one of his high-flown laudations of his idol,
when Raphael checked him.

'I fear our common sympathy on that subject is rather weakened. I have
begun to doubt her lately nearly as much as I doubt philosophy.'

'Not her virtue?

'No, friend; nor her beauty, nor he