with the fields to which they ensured fertility, under the pressure of Roman extortion and misrule, they had entered one evening the mouth of the great canal of Alexandria, slid easily all night across the star-bespangled shadows of Lake Mareotis, and found themselves, when the next morning dawned, among the countless masts and noisy quays of the greatest seaport in the world. The motley crowd of foreigners, the hubbub of all dialects from the Crimea to Cadiz, the vast piles of merchandise, and heaps of wheat, lying unsheltered in that rainless air, the huge bulk of the corn-ships lading for Rome, whose tall sides rose story over story, like floating palaces, above the buildings of some inner dock—these sights, and a hundred more, made the young monk think that the world did not look at first sight a thing to be despised. In front of heaps of fruit, fresh from the market-boats, black groups of glossy negro slaves were basking and laughing on the quay, looking anxiously and coquettishly round in hopes of a purchaser; they evidently did not think the change from desert toil to city luxuries a change for the worse. Philammon turned away his eyes from beholding vanity; but only to meet fresh vanity wheresoever they fell. He felt crushed by the multitude of new objects, stunned by the din around; and scarcely recollected himself enough to seize the first opportunity of escaping from his dangerous companions.
‘Holloa!’ roared Smid the armourer, as he scrambled on to the steps of the slip; ‘you are not going to run away without bidding us good-bye?’
‘Stop with me, boy!’ said old Wulf. ‘I saved you; and you are my man.’
Philammon turned and hesitated.
‘I am a monk, and God’s man.’
‘You can be that anywhere. I will make you a warrior.’
‘The weapons of my warfare are not of flesh and blood, but prayer and fasting,’ answered poor Philammon, who felt already that he should have ten times more need of the said weapons in Alexandria than ever he had had in the desert. … ‘Let me go! I am not made for your life! I thank you, bless you! I will pray for you, sir! but let me go!’
‘Curse the craven hound!’ roared half a dozen voices. ‘Why did you not let us have our will with him, Prince Wulf? You might have expected such gratitude from a monk.’
‘He owes me my share of the sport,’ quoth Smid. ‘And here it is!’ And a hatchet, thrown with practised aim, whistled right for Philammon’s head—he had just time to swerve, and the weapon struck and snapped against the granite wall behind.
‘Well saved!’ said Wulf coolly, while the sailors and market-women above yelled murder, and the custom-house officers, and other constables and catchpolls of the harbour, rushed to the place—and retired again quietly at the thunder of the Amal from the boat’s stern—
‘Never mind, my good follows! we’re only Goths; and on a visit to the prefect, too.’
‘Only Goths, my donkey-riding friends!’ echoed Smid, and at that ominous name the whole posse comitatus tried to look unconcerned, and found suddenly that their presence was absolutely required in an opposite direction.
‘Let him go,’ said Wulf, as he stalked up the steps. ‘Let the boy go. I never set my heart on any man yet,’ he growled to himself in an under voice, ‘but what he disappointed me—and I must not expect more from this fellow. Come, men, ashore, and get drunk!’
Philammon, of course, now that he had leave to go, longed to stay—at all events, he must go back and thank his hosts. He turned unwillingly to do so, as hastily as he could, and found Pelagia and her gigantic lover just entering a palanquin. With downcast eyes he approached the beautiful basilisk, and stammered out some commonplace; and she, full of smiles, turned to him at once.
‘Tell us more about yourself before we part. You speak such beautiful Greek—true Athenian. It is quite delightful to hear one’s own accent again. Were you ever at Athens?’
‘When I was a child; I recollect—that is, I think—’
‘What?’ asked Pelagia eagerly.
‘A great house in Athens—and a great battle there—and coming to Egypt in a ship.’
‘Heavens!’ said Pelagia, and paused. … ‘How strange! Girls, who said he was like me?’
‘I’m sure we meant no harm, if we did say it in a joke,’ pouted one of the attendants.
‘Like me!—you must come and see us. I have something to say to you. … You must!’
Philammon misinterpreted the intense interest of her tone, and if he did not shrink back, gave some involuntary gesture of reluctance. Pelagia laughed aloud.
‘Don’t be vain enough to suspect, foolish boy, but come! Do you think that I have nothing to talk about but nonsense? Come and see me. It may be better for you. I live in—’ and she named a fashionable street, which Philammon, though he inwardly vowed not to accept the invitation, somehow could not help remembering.
‘Do leave the wild man, and come,’ growled the Amal from within the palanquin. ‘You are not going to turn nun, I hope?’
‘Not while the first man I ever met in the world stays in it,’ answered Pelagia, as she skipped into the palanquin, taking care to show the most lovely white heel and ankle, and, like the Parthian, send a random arrow as she retreated. But the dart was lost on Philammon, who had been already hustled away by the bevy of laughing attendants, amid baskets, dressing-cases, and bird-cages, and was fain to make his escape into the Babel round, and inquire his way to the patriarch’s house.
‘Patriarch’s house?’ answered the man whom he first addressed, a little lean, swarthy fellow, with merry black eyes, who, with a basket of fruit at his feet, was sunning himself on a baulk of timber, meditatively chewing the papyrus-cane, and examining the strangers with a look of absurd sagacity. ‘I know it; without a doubt I know it; all Alexandria has good reason to know it. Are you a monk?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then ask your way of the monks; you won’t go far without finding one.’
‘But I do not even know the right direction; what is your grudge against monks, my good man?’
‘Look here, my youth; you seem too ingenuous for a monk. Don’t flatter yourself that it will last. If you can wear the sheepskin, and haunt the churches here for a month, without learning to lie, and slander, and clap, and hoot, and perhaps play your part in a sedition—and—murder satyric drama—why, you are a better man than I take you for. I, sir, am a Greek and a philosopher; though the whirlpool of matter may have, and indeed has, involved my ethereal spark in the body of a porter. Therefore, youth,’ continued the little man, starting up upon his baulk like an excited monkey, and stretching out one oratorio paw, ‘I bear a treble hatred to the monkish tribe. First, as a man and a husband; … for as for the smiles of beauty, or otherwise—such as I have, I have; and the monks, if they had their wicked will, would leave neither men nor women in the world. Sir, they would exterminate the human race in a single generation, by a voluntary suicide! Secondly, as a porter; for if all men turned monks, nobody would be idle, and the profession of portering would be annihilated. Thirdly, sir, as a philosopher; for as the false coin is odious to the true, so is the irrational and animal asceticism of the monk, to the logical and methodic self-restraint of one who, like your humblest of philosophers, aspires to a life according to the pure reason.’
‘And pray,’ asked Philammon, half laughing, ‘who
