dually below their
path. The evening came as they passed along a steep white road with
many windings among the pines, and it was night when they reached the
temple, the lights of which shone out upon them pausing before the
gates of the sacred enclosure, while Marius became alive to a singular
purity in the air. A rippling of water about the place was the only
thing audible, as they waited till two priestly figures, speaking Greek
to one another, admitted them into a large, white-walled and clearly
lighted guest-chamber, in which, while he partook of a simple but
wholesomely prepared supper, Marius still seemed to feel pleasantly the
height they had attained to among the hills.

The agreeable sense of all this was spoiled by one thing only, his old
fear of serpents; for it was under the form of a serpent that
Aesculapius [31] had come to Rome, and the last definite thought of his
weary head before he fell asleep had been a dread either that the god
might appear, as he was said sometimes to do, under this hideous
aspect, or perhaps one of those great sallow-hued snakes themselves,
kept in the sacred place, as he had also heard was usual.

And after an hour's feverish dreaming he awoke--with a cry, it would
seem, for some one had entered the room bearing a light. The footsteps
of the youthful figure which approached and sat by his bedside were
certainly real. Ever afterwards, when the thought arose in his mind of
some unhoped-for but entire relief from distress, like blue sky in a
storm at sea, would come back the memory of that gracious countenance
which, amid all the kindness of its gaze, had yet a certain air of
predominance over him, so that he seemed now for the first time to have
found the master of his spirit. It would have been sweet to be the
servant of him who now sat beside him speaking.

He caught a lesson from what was then said, still somewhat beyond his
years, a lesson in the skilled cultivation of life, of experience, of
opportunity, which seemed to be the aim of the young priest's
recommendations. The sum of them, through various forgotten intervals
of argument, as might really have happened in a [32] dream, was the
precept, repeated many times under slightly varied aspects, of a
diligent promotion of the capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the eye
would lie for him the determining influence of life: he was of the
number of those who, in the words of a poet who came long after, must
be "made perf