, vied for
custom by disseminating gossip.

So Sextus used a passage running parallel to that one, leading between
workshops where the burial-urn makers' slaves engraved untruthful
epitaphs in baked clay or inlaid them on the marble tomb-slabs--to be
gilded presently with gold-leaf (since a gilded lie, though costlier, is
no worse than the same lie unadorned.)

He drummed a signal with his knuckles on the panel of a narrow door of
olive-wood, set deep into the wall under a projecting arch. An
overleaning tree increased the shadow, and a visitor could wait without
attracting notice. A slave nearly as old as Galen presently admitted
him into a paved yard in which a fish-pond had been built around an
ancient well. A few old fruit-trees grew against the wall, and there
were potted shrubs, but little evidence of gardening, most of Galen's
slaves being too old for that kind of work. There were a dozen of them
loafing in the yard; some were so fat that they wheezed, and some so
thin with age that they resembled skeletons. There was a rumor that the
fatness and the thinness were accounted for by Galen's fondness for
experiments. Old Galen had a hundred jealous rivals and they even said
he fed the dead slaves to the fish; but it was Roman custom to give no
man credit for humaneness if an unclean accusation could be made to
stick.

Another fat old slave led Sextus to a porch behind the house and through
that to a library extremely bare of furniture but lined with shelves on
which rolled manuscripts were stacked in tagged and numbered order;
they were dusty, as if Galen used them very little nowadays. There were
two doors in addition to the one that opened on the porch; the old
slave pointed to the smaller one and Sextus, stooping and turning
sidewise because of the narrowness between the posts, went down a step
and entered without knocking.

For a moment he could not see Galen, there was such confusion of shadow
and light. High shelves around the walls of a long, shed-like room were
crowded with retorts and phials. An enormous, dusty human skeleton,
articulated on concealed wire, moved as if annoyed by the intrusion.
There were many kinds of skulls of animals and men on brackets fastened
to the wall, and there were jars containing dead things soaked in
spirit. Some of the jars were enormous, having once held olive oil. On
a table down the midst were instruments, a scale for weighing chemicals,
some measures and