ll be fines, fetters, stocks, prison--"

"Peace," groaned Phormio, terrified at the Gorgon, "I only thought--"

"How dared you think? What permitted--"

"Good evening, sweet sister and Phormio!" The salutation came from Polus,
who with Clearchus had approached unheralded. Lampaxo smoothed her ruffled
feathers. Phormio stifled his sorrows. Dromo, the half-starved slave-boy,
brought a pot of thin wine to his betters. The short southern twilight was
swiftly passing into night. Groups of young men wandered past, bound
homeward from the Cynosarges, the Academy, or some other well-loved
gymnasium. In an hour the streets would be dark and still, except for a
belated guest going to his banquet, a Scythian constable, or perhaps a
cloak thief. For your Athenian, when he had no supper invitation, went to
bed early and rose early, loving the sunlight far better than the flicker
of his uncertain lamps.

"And did the jury vote 'guilty'?" was Phormio's first question of his
brother-in-law.

"We were patriotically united. There were barely any white beans for
acquittal in the urn. The scoundrelly grain-dealer is stripped of all he
possesses and sent away to beg in exile. A noble service to Athens!"

"Despite the evidence," murmured Clearchus; but Lampaxo's shrill voice
answered her brother:--

"It's my opinion you jurors should look into a case directly opposite this
house. Spies, I say, Persian spies."

"Spies!" cried Polus, leaping up as from a coal; "why, Phormio, haven't
you denounced them? It's compounding with treason even to fail to report--"

"Peace, brother," chuckled the fishmonger, "your sister smells for treason
as a dog for salt fish. There is a barbarian carpet merchant--a Babylonian,
I presume--who has taken the empty chambers above Demas's shield factory
opposite. He seems a quiet, inoffensive man; there are a hundred other
foreign merchants in the city. One can't cry 'Traitor!' just because the
poor wight was not born to speak Greek."

"I do not like Babylonish merchants," propounded Polus, dogmatically; "to
the jury with him, I say!"

"At least he has a visitor," asserted Clearchus, who had long been silent.
"See, a gentleman wrapped in a long himation is going up to the door and
standing up his walking stick."

"And if I have eyes," vowed the juror, squinting through his hands in the
half light, "that closely wrapped man is Glaucon the Alcmaeonid."

"Or Democrates," remarked Clearchus; "they look much a