such misfortunes must have happened to men who
are unable to move themselves.

"But no. The sucking-fish of these men is their hindering corruption.
The shell-fishes that bite them are their avaricious hearts. The torpedo
that benumbs them is lying guile. With perverted ingenuity they
manufacture delays, that they may seem to have met with a run of
ill-luck.

"Let your Greatness, whom it especially behoves to take thought for such
matters, cause that this be put right by speediest rebuke: lest the
famine, which will otherwise ensue, be deemed to be the child of
negligence rather than of the barrenness of the land".

The occasion of the second letter (Var., x., 30.) was as follows. Some
brazen images of elephants which adorned the Sacred Street of Rome were
falling into ruin, Cassiodorus, writing in the name of one of
Theodoric's successors, to the Prefect of the City, orders that their
gaping limbs should be strengthened by hooks, and their pendulous
bellies should be supported by masonry. He then proceeds to give to the
admiring Prefect some wonderful information as to the natural history
of the elephant. He regrets that the metal effigies should be so soon
destroyed, when the animal which they represent is accustomed to live
more than a thousand years.

"The living elephant" he says, "when it is once prostrate on the ground,
cannot rise unaided, because it has no joints in its feet. Hence when
they are helping men to fell timber, you see numbers of them lying on
the earth till men come and help them to rise. Thus this creature, so
formidable by its size, is really more helpless than the tiny ant. The
elephant, wiser than all other creatures, renders religious adoration to
the Ruler of all: also to good princes, but if a tyrant approach, it
will not pay him the homage which is due only to the virtuous. It uses
its proboscis, that nose-like hand which Nature has given it in
compensation for its very short neck, for the benefit of its master,
accepting the presents which will be profitable to him. It always walks
cautiously, remembering that fatal fall into the hunter's pit which was
the beginning of its captivity. When requested to do so, it exhales its
breath, which is said to be a remedy for the headache.

"When it comes to water, it sucks up a vast quantity in its trunk, and
then at the word of command squirts it forth like a shower. If any one
have treated its demands with contempt, it pours forth such a strea