ad
come perfect from the moulds.

'Is that your honest judgment, Piso? Christians, they say, ever speak
the exact truth. Fifty times have I gone where you now are to determine
the point. My brother says it is right. But I cannot tell. I have
attempted the work in too much haste; but Aurelian thinks, I believe,
that a silver man may be made as easily as a flesh one may be unmade.
Rome is not Palmyra, Piso. What a life there for an artist! Calm as a
summer sea. Here! by all the gods and goddesses! if one hears of
anything but of blood and death! Heads all on where they should be
to-day, to-morrow are off. To-day, captives cut up on the altars of some
accursed god, and to-morrow thrown to some savage beast, no better and
no worse, for the entertainment of savages worse than either or all. The
very boys in the streets talk of little else than of murderous sports of
gladiators or wild animals. I swear to you, a man can scarce collect or
keep his thoughts here. What's this about the Christians too? I marvel,
Piso, to see you here alive! They say you are to be all cut up root and
branch. Take my advice, and fly with me back to Palmyra! Not another
half year would I pass among these barbarians for all the patronage of
the Emperor, his minions, and the senate at their heels. What say you?'

'No, Demetrius, I cannot go; but I should not blame you for going. Rome
is no place, I agree with you, for the life contemplative, or for the
pure and innocent labors of art. It is the spot for intense action;
but--'

'Suffering you mean--'

'That too, most assuredly, but of action too. It is the great heart of
the world.'

'Black as Erebus and night.'

'Yes, but still a great one, which, if it can be once made to beat true,
will send its blood, then a pure and life-giving current, to the
remotest extremities of the world, which is its body. I hope for the
time to come when this will be true. There is more goodness in Rome,
Demetrius, than you have heard, or known of. There is a people here
worth saving: I, with the other Christians, am set to this work. We must
not abandon it.'

''Twill be small comfort though, should you all perish doing it.'

'Our perishing might be but the means of new and greater multitudes
springing up to finish what we had begun, but left incomplete. There is
great life in death. Blood, spilled upon the ground, is a kind of seed
that comes up men. Truth is not extinguished by putting out life. It
then seems