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+The Project Gutenberg EBook A Thorny Path, by Georg Ebers, v1
+#91 in our series by Georg Ebers
+
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+Title: A Thorny Path, Volume 1.
+
+Author: Georg Ebers
+
+Release Date: April, 2004  [EBook #5530]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on July 19, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A THRONY PATH, BY EBERS, V1 ***
+
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+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+A THORNY PATH
+
+By Georg Ebers
+
+Volume 1.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+The green screen slowly rose, covering the lower portion of the broad
+studio window where Heron, the gem-cutter, was at work.  It was Melissa,
+the artist's daughter, who had pulled it up, with bended knees and
+outstretched arms, panting for breath.
+
+"That is enough!" cried her father's impatient voice.  He glanced up at
+the flood of light which the blinding sun of Alexandria was pouring into
+the room, as it did every autumn afternoon; but as soon as the shadow
+fell on his work-table the old man's busy fingers were at work again, and
+he heeded his daughter no more.
+
+An hour later Melissa again, and without any bidding, pulled up the
+screen as before, but it was so much too heavy for her that the effort
+brought the blood into her calm, fair face, as the deep, rough "That is
+enough" was again heard from the work-table.
+
+Then silence reigned once more.  Only the artist's low whistling as he
+worked, or the patter and pipe of the birds in their cages by the window,
+broke the stillness of the spacious room, till the voice and step of a
+man were presently heard in the anteroom.
+
+Heron laid by his graver and Melissa her gold embroidery, and the eyes
+of father and daughter met for the first time for some hours.  The very
+birds seemed excited, and a starling, which had sat moping since the
+screen had shut the sun out, now cried out, "Olympias!" Melissa rose, and
+after a swift glance round the room she went to the door, come who might.
+
+Ay, even if the brother she was expecting should bring a companion,
+or a patron of art who desired her father's work, the room need not fear
+a critical eye; and she was so well assured of the faultless neatness of
+her own person, that she only passed a hand over her brown hair, and with
+an involuntary movement pulled her simple white robe more tightly through
+her girdle.
+
+Heron's studio was as clean and as simple as his daughter's attire,
+though it seemed larger than enough for the purpose it served, for only a
+very small part of it was occupied by the artist, who sat as if in exile
+behind the work-table on which his belongings were laid out: a set of
+small instruments in a case, a tray filled with shells and bits of onyx
+and other agates, a yellow ball of Cyrenian modeling-wax, pumice-stone,
+bottles, boxes, and bowls.
+
+Melissa had no sooner crossed the threshold, than the sculptor drew up
+his broad shoulders and brawny person, and raised his hand to fling away
+the slender stylus he had been using; however, he thought better of it,
+and laid it carefully aside with the other tools.  But this act of self-
+control must have cost the hot-headed, powerful man a great effort; for
+he shot a fierce look at the instrument which had had so narrow an
+escape, and gave it a push of vexation with the back of his hand.
+
+Then he turned towards the door, his sunburnt face looking surly enough,
+in its frame of tangled gray hair and beard; and, as he waited for the
+visitor whom Melissa was greeting outside, he tossed back his big head,
+and threw out his broad, deep chest, as though preparing to wrestle.
+
+Melissa presently returned, and the youth whose hand she still held was,
+as might be seen in every feature, none other than the sculptor's son.
+Both were dark-eyed, with noble and splendid heads, and in stature
+perfectly equal; but while the son's countenance beamed with hearty
+enjoyment, and seemed by its peculiar attractiveness to be made--and to
+be accustomed--to charm men and women alike, his father's face was
+expressive of disgust and misanthropy.  It seemed, indeed, as though the
+newcomer had roused his ire, for Heron answered his son's cheerful
+greeting with no word but a reproachful "At last!"  and paid no heed to
+the hand the youth held out to him.
+
+Alexander was no doubt inured to such a reception; he did not disturb
+himself about the old man's ill-humor, but slapped him on the shoulder
+with rough geniality, went up to the work-table with easy composure, took
+up the vice which held the nearly finished gem, and, after holding it to
+the light and examining it carefully, exclaimed: "Well done, father!
+You have done nothing better than that for a long time."
+
+"Poor stuff!" said his father.  But his son laughed.
+
+"If you will have it so.  But I will give one of my eyes to see the man
+in Alexandria who can do the like!"
+
+At this the old man broke out, and shaking his fist he cried: "Because
+the man who can find anything worth doing, takes good care not to waste
+his time here, making divine art a mere mockery by such trifling with
+toys!  By Sirius!  I should like to fling all those pebbles into the
+fire, the onyx and shells and jasper and what not, and smash all those
+wretched tools with these fists, which were certainly made for other work
+than this."
+
+The youth laid an arm round his father's stalwart neck, and gayly
+interrupted his wrath.  "Oh yes, Father Heron, Philip and I have felt
+often enough that they know how to hit hard."
+
+"Not nearly often enough," growled the artist, and the young man went on:
+
+"That I grant, though every blow from you was equal to a dozen from the
+hand of any other father in Alexandria.  But that those mighty fists on
+human arms should have evoked the bewitching smile on the sweet lips of
+this Psyche, if it is not a miracle of art, is--"
+
+"The degradation of art," the old man put in; but Alexander hastily
+added:
+
+"The victory of the exquisite over the coarse."
+
+"A victory!" exclaimed Heron, with a scornful flourish of his hand.
+"I know, boy, why you are trying to garland the oppressive yoke with
+flowers of flattery.  So long as your surly old father sits over the
+vice, he only whistles a song and spares you his complaints.  And then,
+there is the money his work brings in!"
+
+He laughed bitterly, and as Melissa looked anxiously up at him, her
+brother exclaimed:
+
+"If I did not know you well, master, and if it would not be too great a
+pity, I would throw that lovely Psyche to the ostrich in Scopas's court-
+yard; for, by Herakles! he would swallow your gem more easily than we can
+swallow such cruel taunts.  We do indeed bless the Muses that work brings
+you some surcease of gloomy thoughts.  But for the rest--I hate to speak
+the word gold.  We want it no more than you, who, when the coffer is
+full, bury it or hide it with the rest.  Apollodorus forced a whole
+talent of the yellow curse upon me for painting his men's room.  The
+sailor's cap, into which I tossed it with the rest, will burst when
+Seleukus pays me for the portrait of his daughter; and if a thief robs
+you, and me too, we need not fret over it.  My brush and your stylus will
+earn us more in no time.  And what are our needs?  We do not bet on
+quail-fights; we do not run races; I always had a loathing for purchased
+love; we do not want to wear a heap of garments bought merely because
+they take our fancy--indeed, I am too hot as it is under this scorching
+sun.  The house is your own.  The rent paid by Glaukias, for the work-
+room and garden you inherited from your father, pays for half at least of
+what we and the birds and the slaves eat.  As for Philip, he lives on air
+and philosophy; and, besides, he is fed out of the great breadbasket of
+the Museum."
+
+At this point the starling interrupted the youth's vehement speech with
+the appropriate cry, "My strength!  my strength!"  The brother and sister
+looked at each other, and Alexander went on with genuine enthusiasm:
+
+"But it is not in you to believe us capable of such meanness.  Dedicate
+your next finished work to Isis or Serapis.  Let your masterpiece grace
+the goddess's head-gear, or the god's robe.  We shall be quite content,
+and perhaps the immortals may restore your joy in life as a reward."
+
+The  bird  repeated  its lamentable cry, "My strength!" and the youth
+proceeded with increased vehemence:
+
+"It would really be better that you should throw your vice and your
+graver and your burnisher, and all that heap of dainty tools, into the
+sea, and carve an Atlas such as we have heard you talk about ever since
+we could first speak Greek.  Come, set to work on a colossus!  You have
+but to speak the word, and the finest clay shall be ready on your
+modeling-table by to-morrow, either here or in Glaukias's work-room,
+which is indeed your own.  I know where the best is to be found, and can
+bring it to you in any quantity.  Scopas will lend me his wagon.  I can
+see it now, and you valiantly struggling with it till your mighty arms
+ache.  You will not whistle and hum over that, but sing out with all your
+might, as you used when my mother was alive, when you and your
+apprentices joined Dionysus's drunken rout.  Then your brow will grow
+smooth again; and if the model is a success, and you want to buy marble,
+or pay the founder, then out with your gold, out of the coffer and its
+hiding-place!  Then you can make use of all your strength, and your dream
+of producing an Atlas such as the world has not seen--your beautiful
+dream-will become a reality!"
+
+Heron had listened eagerly to his son's rhapsody, but he now cast a timid
+glance at the table where the wax and tools lay, pushed the rough hair
+from his brow, and broke in with a bitter laugh: "My dream, do you say--
+my dream?  As if I did not know too well that I am no longer the man to
+create an Atlas!  As if I did not feel, without your words, that my
+strength for it is a thing of the past!"
+
+"Nay, father," exclaimed the painter.  "Is it right to cast away the
+sword before the battle?  And even if you did not succeed--"
+
+"You would be all the better pleased," the sculptor put in.  "What surer
+way could  there be to teach the old simpleton, once for all, that the
+time when he could do great work is over and gone?"
+
+"That is unjust, father; that is unworthy of you," the young man
+interrupted in great excitement; but his father went on, raising his
+voice; "Silence, boy!  One thing at any rate is left to me, as you know--
+my keen eyes; and they did not fail me when you two looked at each other
+as the starling cried, 'My strength!'  Ay, the bird is in the right when
+he bewails what was once so great and is now a mere laughing-stock.  But
+you--you ought to reverence the man to whom you owe your existence and
+all you know; you allow yourself to shrug your shoulders over your own
+father's humbler art, since your first pictures were fairly successful.
+--How puffed up he is, since, by my devoted care, he has been a painter!
+How he looks down on the poor wretch who, by the pinch of necessity, has
+come down from being a sculptor of the highest promise to being a mere
+gem-cutter!  In the depths of your soul--and I know it--you regard my
+laborious art as half a handicraft.  Well, perhaps it deserves no better
+name; but that you--both of you--should make common cause with a bird,
+and mock the sacred fire which still burns in an old man, and moves him
+to serve true and noble art and to mold something great--an Atlas such as
+the world has never seen on a heroic scale; that--"
+
+He covered his face with his hands and sobbed aloud.  And the strong
+man's passionate grief cut his children to the heart, though, since their
+mother's death, their father's rage and discontent had many a time ere
+now broken down into childish lamentation.
+
+To-day no doubt the old man was in worse spirits than usual, for it was
+the day of the Nekysia--the feast of the dead kept every autumn; and he
+had that morning visited his wife's grave, accompanied by his daughter,
+and had anointed the tombstone and decked it with flowers.  The young
+people tried to comfort him; and when at last he was more composed and
+had dried his tears, he said, in so melancholy and subdued a tone that
+the angry blusterer was scarcely recognizable: "There--leave me alone;
+it will soon be over.  I will finish this gem to-morrow, and then I must
+do the Serapis I promised Theophilus, the high-priest.  Nothing can come
+of the Atlas.  Perhaps you meant it in all sincerity, Alexander; but
+since your mother left me, children, since then--my arms are no weaker
+than they were; but in here--what it was that shriveled, broke, leaked
+away--I can not find words for it.  If you care for me--and I know you
+do--you must not be vexed with me if my gall rises now and then; there is
+too much bitterness in my soul.  I can not reach the goal I strive after
+and was meant to win; I have lost what I loved best, and where am I to
+find comfort or compensation?"
+
+His children tenderly assured him of their affection, and he allowed
+Melissa to kiss him, and stroked Alexander's hair.
+
+Then he inquired for Philip, his eldest son and his favorite; and on
+learning that he, the only person who, as he believed, could understand
+him, would not come to see him this day above all others, he again broke
+out in wrath, abusing the degeneracy of the age and the ingratitude of
+the young.
+
+"Is it a visit which detains him again?" he inquired, and when Alexander
+thought not, he exclaimed contemptuously: "Then it is some war of words
+at the Museum.  And for such poor stuff as that a son can forget his duty
+to his father and mother!"
+
+"But you, too, used to enjoy these conflicts of intellect," his daughter
+humbly remarked; but the old man broke in:
+
+"Only because they help a miserable world to forget the torments of
+existence, and the hideous certainty of having been born only to die some
+horrible death.  But what can you know of this?"
+
+"By my mother's death-bed," replied the girl, "we, too, had a glimpse
+into the terrible mystery."  And Alexander gravely added, "And since we
+last met, father, I may certainly account myself as one of the
+initiated."
+
+"You have painted a dead body?"  asked his father.
+
+"Yes, father," replied the lad with a deep breath.  "I warned you," said
+Heron, in a tone of superior experience.
+
+And then, as Melissa rearranged the folds of his blue robe, he said he
+should go for a walk.  He sighed as he spoke, and his children knew
+whither he would go.  It was to the grave to which Melissa had
+accompanied him that morning; and he would visit it alone,
+to meditate undisturbed on the wife he had lost.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+The brother and sister were left together.  Melissa sighed deeply; but
+her brother went up to her, laid his arm round her shoulder, and said:
+"Poor child!  you have indeed a hard time of it.  Eighteen years old, and
+as pretty as you are, to be kept locked up as if in prison!  No one would
+envy you, even if your fellow-captive and keeper were younger and less
+gloomy than your father is!  But we know what it all means.  His grief
+eats into his soul, and it does him as much good to storm and scold, as
+it does us to laugh."
+
+"If only the world could know how kind his heart really is!" said the
+girl.
+
+"He is not the same to his friends as to us," said Alexander; but Melissa
+shook her head, and said sadly: "He broke out yesterday against Apion,
+the dealer, and it was dreadful.  For the fiftieth time he had waited
+supper for you two in vain, and in the twilight, when he had done work,
+his grief overcame him, and to see him weep is quite heartbreaking!  The
+Syrian dealer came in and found him all tearful, and being so bold as to
+jest about it in his flippant way--"
+
+"The old man would give him his answer, I know!"  cried her brother with
+a hearty laugh.  "He will not again be in a hurry to stir up a wounded
+lion."
+
+"That is the very word," said Melissa, and her large eyes sparkled.  "At
+the fight in the Circus, I could not help thinking of my father, when the
+huge king of the desert lay with a broken spear in his loins, whining
+loudly, and burying his maned head between his great paws.  The gods are
+pitiless!"
+
+"Indeed they are," replied the youth, with deep conviction; but his
+sister looked up at him in surprise.
+
+"Do you say so, Alexander?  Yes, indeed--you looked just now as I never
+saw you before.  Has misfortune overtaken you too?"
+
+"Misfortune?"  he repeated, and he gently stroked her hair.  "No, not
+exactly; and you know my woes sit lightly enough on me.  The immortals
+have indeed shown me very plainly that it is their will sometimes to
+spoil the feast of life with a right bitter draught.  But, like the moon
+itself, all it shines on is doomed to change--happily!  Many things here
+below seem strangely ordered.  Like ears and eyes, hands and feet, many
+things are by nature double, and misfortunes, as they say, commonly come
+in couples yoked like oxen."
+
+"Then you have had some twofold blow?"  asked Melissa, clasping her hands
+over her anxiously throbbing bosom.
+
+"I, child!  No, indeed.  Nothing has befallen your father's younger son;
+and if I were a philosopher, like Philip, I should be moved to wonder why
+a man can only be wet when the rain falls on him, and yet can be so
+wretched when disaster falls on another.  But do not look at me with such
+terror in your great eyes.  I swear to you that, as a man and an artist,
+I never felt better, and so I ought properly to be in my usual frame of
+mind.  But the skeleton at life's festival has been shown to me.  What
+sort of thing is that?  It is an image--the image of a dead man which
+was carried round by the Egyptians, and is to this day by the Romans, to
+remind the feasters that they should fill every hour with enjoyment,
+since enjoyment is all too soon at an end.  Such an image, child--"
+
+"You are thinking of the dead girl--Seleukus's daughter--whose portrait
+you are painting?" asked Melissa.
+
+Alexander nodded, sat down on the bench by his sister, and, taking up her
+needlework, exclaimed "Give us some light, child.  I want to see your
+pretty face.  I want to be sure that Diodorus did not perjure himself
+when, at the 'Crane,' the other day, he swore that it had not its match
+in Alexandria.  Besides, I hate the darkness."
+
+When Melissa returned with the lighted lamp, she found her brother, who
+was not wont to keep still, sitting in the place where she had left him.
+But he sprang up as she entered, and prevented her further greeting by
+exclaiming:
+
+"Patience! patience!  You  shall be told all.  Only I did not want to
+worry you on the day of the festival of the dead.  And besides, to-morrow
+perhaps he will be in a better frame of mind, and next day--"
+
+Melissa became urgent.  "If Philip is ill--" she put in.
+
+"Not exactly ill," said he.  "He has no fever, no ague-fit, no aches and
+pains.  He is not in bed, and has no bitter draughts to swallow.  Yet is
+he not well, any more than I, though but just now, in the dining-hall at
+the Elephant, I ate like a starving wolf, and could at this moment jump
+over this table.  Shall I prove it?"
+
+"No, no," said his sister, in growing distress.  "But, if you love me,
+tell me at once and plainly--"At once and plainly," sighed the painter.
+"That, in any case, will not be easy.  But I will do my best.  You knew
+Korinna?"
+
+"Seleukus's daughter?"
+
+"She herself--the maiden from whose corpse I am painting her portrait."
+
+"No.  But you wanted--"
+
+"I wanted to be brief, but I care even more to be understood; and if you
+have never seen with your own eyes, if you do not yourself know what a
+miracle of beauty the gods wrought when they molded that maiden, you are
+indeed justified in regarding me as a fool and Philip as a madman--which,
+thank the gods, he certainly is not yet."
+
+"Then he too has seen the dead maiden?"
+
+"No, no.  And yet--perhaps.  That at present remains a mystery.  I hardly
+know what happened even to myself.  I succeeded in controlling myself in
+my father's presence; but now, when it all rises up before me, before my
+very eyes, so distinct, so real, so tangible, now--by Sirius!  Melissa,
+if you interrupt me again--"
+
+"Begin again.  I will be silent," she cried.  "I can easily picture your
+Korinna as a divinely beautiful creature."
+
+Alexander raised his hands to heaven, exclaiming with passionate
+vehemence: "Oh, how would I praise and glorify the gods, who formed that
+marvel of their art, and my mouth should be full of their grace and
+mercy, if they had but allowed the world to sun itself in the charm of
+that glorious creature, and to worship their everlasting beauty in her
+who was their image!  But they have wantonly destroyed their own
+masterpiece, have crushed the scarce-opened bud, have darkened the star
+ere it has risen!  If a man had done it, Melissa, a man what would his
+doom have been!  If he--"
+
+Here the youth hid his face in his hands in passionate emotion; but,
+feeling his sister's arm round his shoulder, he recovered himself, and
+went on more calmly: "Well, you heard that she was dead.  She was of just
+your age; she is dead at eighteen, and her father commissioned me to
+paint her in death.--Pour me out  some water;  then I will proceed as
+coldly as a man crying the description of a runaway slave."  He drank a
+deep draught, and wandered restlessly up and down in front of his sister,
+while he told her all that had happened to him during the last few days.
+
+The day before yesterday, at noon, he had left the inn where he had been
+carousing with friends, gay and careless, and had obeyed the call of
+Seleukus.  Just before raising the knocker he had been singing cheerfully
+to himself.  Never had he felt more fully content--the gayest of the gay.
+One of the first men in the town, and a connoisseur, had honored him with
+a fine commission, and the prospect of painting something dead had
+pleased him.  His old master had often admired the exquisite delicacy of
+the flesh-tones of a recently deceased body.  As his glance fell on the
+implements that his slave carried after him, he had drawn himself up with
+the proud feeling of having before him a noble task, to which he felt
+equal.  Then the porter, a gray-bearded Gaul, had opened the door to him,
+and as he looked into his care-worn face and received from him a silent
+permission to step in, he had already become more serious.
+
+He had heard marvels of the magnificence of the house that he now
+entered; and the lofty vestibule into which he was admitted, the mosaic
+floor that he trod; the marble statues and high reliefs round the upper
+hart of the walls, were well worth careful observation; yet he, whose
+eyes usually carried away so vivid an impression of what he had once seen
+that he could draw it from memory, gave no attention to any particular
+thing among the various objects worthy of admiration.  For already in the
+anteroom a peculiar sensation had come over him.  The large halls, which
+were filled with odors of ambergris and incense, were as still as the
+grave.  And it seemed to him that even the sun, which had been shining
+brilliantly a few minutes before in a cloudless sky, had disappeared
+behind clouds, for a strange twilight, unlike anything he had ever seen,
+surrounded him.  Then he perceived that it came in through the black
+velarium with which they had closed the open roof of the room through
+which he was passing.
+
+In the anteroom a young freedman had hurried silently past him--had
+vanished like a shadow through the dusky rooms.  His duty must have been
+to announce the artist's arrival to the mother of the dead girl; for,
+before Alexander had found time to feast his gaze on the luxurious mass
+of flowering plants that surrounded the fountain in the middle of the
+impluvium, a tall matron, in flowing mourning garments, came towards him
+--Korinna's mother.
+
+Without lifting the black veil which enveloped her from head to foot, she
+speechlessly signed him to follow her.  Till this moment not even a
+whisper had met his ear from any human lips in this house of death and
+mourning; and the stillness was so oppressive to the light-hearted young
+painter, that, merely to hear the sound of his own voice, he ex-plained
+to the lady who he was and wherefore he had come.  But the only answer
+was a dumb assenting bow of the head.
+
+He had not far to go with his stately guide; their walk ended in a
+spacious room.  It had been made a perfect flower-garden with hundreds of
+magnificent plants; piles of garlands strewed the floor, and in the midst
+stood the couch on which lay the dead girl.  In this hall, too, reigned
+the same gloomy twilight which had startled him in the vestibule.
+
+The dim, shrouded form lying motionless on the couch before him, with a
+heavy wreath of lotus-flowers and white roses encircling it from head to
+foot, was the subject for his brush.  He was to paint here, where he
+could scarcely distinguish one plant from another, or make out the form
+of the vases which stood round the bed of death.  The white blossoms
+alone gleamed like pale lights in the gloom, and with a sister radiance
+something smooth and round which lay on the couch--the bare arm of the
+dead maiden.
+
+His heart began to throb; the artist's love of his art had awaked within
+him; he had collected his wits, and explained to the matron that to paint
+in the darkness was impossible.
+
+Again she bowed in reply, but at a signal two waiting women, who were
+squatting on the floor behind the couch, started up in the twilight, as
+if they had sprung from the earth, and approached their mistress.
+
+A fresh shock chilled the painter's blood, for at the same moment the
+lady's voice was suddenly audible close to his ear, almost as deep as a
+man's but not unmelodious, ordering the girls to draw back the curtain as
+far as the painter should desire.
+
+Now, he felt, the spell was broken; curiosity and eagerness took the
+place of reverence for death.  He quietly gave his orders for the
+necessary arrangements, lent the women the help of his stronger arm, took
+out his painting implements, and then requested the matron to unveil the
+dead girl, that he might see from which side it would be best to take the
+portrait.  But then again he was near losing his composure, for the lady
+raised her veil, and measured him with a glance as though he had asked
+something strange and audacious indeed.
+
+Never had he met so piercing a glance from any woman's eyes; and yet they
+were red with weeping and full of tears.  Bitter grief spoke in every
+line of her still youthful features, and their stern, majestic beauty was
+in keeping with the deep tones of her speech.  Oh that he had been so
+happy as to see this woman in the bloom of youthful loveliness!  She did
+not heed his admiring surprise; before acceding to his demand, her regal
+form trembled from head to foot, and she sighed as she lifted the shroud
+from her daughter's face.  Then, with a groan, she dropped on her knees
+by the couch and laid her cheek against that of the dead maiden.  At last
+she rose, and murmured to the painter that if he were successful in his
+task her gratitude would be beyond expression.
+
+"What more she said," Alexander went on, "I could but half understand,
+for she wept all the time, and I could not collect my thoughts.  It was
+not till afterward that I learned from her waiting-woman--a Christian--
+that she meant to tell me that the relations and wailing women were to
+come to-morrow morning.  I could paint on till nightfall, but no longer.
+I had been chosen for the task because Seleukus had heard from my old
+teacher, Bion, that I should get a faithful likeness of the original more
+quickly than any one else.  She may have said more, but I heard nothing;
+I only saw.  For when the veil no longer hid that face from my gaze, I
+felt as though the gods had revealed a mystery to me which till now only
+the immortals had been permitted to know.  Never was my soul so steeped
+in devotion, never had my heart beat in such solemn uplifting as at that
+moment.  What I was gazing at and had to represent was a thing neither
+human nor divine; it was beauty itself--that beauty of which I have often
+dreamed in blissful rapture.
+
+"And yet--do not misapprehend me--I never thought of bewailing the
+maiden, or grieving over her early death.  She was but sleeping--I could
+fancy: I watched one I loved in her slumbers.  My heart beat high!  Ay,
+child, and the work I did was pure joy, such joy as only the gods on
+Olympus know at their golden board.  Every feature, every line was of
+such perfection as only the artist's soul can conceive of, nay, even
+dream of.  The ecstasy remained, but my unrest gave way to an
+indescribable and wordless bliss.  I drew with the red chalk, and mixed
+the colors with the grinder, and all the while I could not feel the
+painful sense of painting a corpse.  If she were slumbering, she had
+fallen asleep with bright images in her memory.  I even fancied again and
+again that her lips moved her exquisitely chiseled mouth, and that a
+faint breath played with her abundant, waving, shining brown hair, as it
+does with yours.
+
+"The Muse sped my hand and the portrait--Bion and the rest will praise
+it, I think, though it is no more like the unapproachable original than
+that lamp is like the evening star yonder."
+
+"And shall we be allowed to see it?" asked Melissa, who had been
+listening breathlessly to her brother's narrative.
+
+The words seemed to have snatched the artist from a dream.  He had to
+pause and consider where he was and to whom he was speaking.  He hastily
+pushed the curling hair off his damp brow, and said:
+
+"I do not understand.  What is it you ask?"
+
+"I only asked whether we should be allowed to see the portrait," she
+answered timidly.  "I was wrong to interrupt you.  But how hot your head
+is!  Drink again before you go on.  Had you really finished by sundown?"
+
+Alexander shook his head, drank, and then went on more calmly: "No, no!
+It is a pity you spoke.  In fancy I was painting her still.  There is the
+moon rising already.  I must make haste.  I have told you all this for
+Philip's sake, not for my own."
+
+"I will not interrupt you again, I assure you," said Melissa.
+"Well, well," said her brother.  "There is not much that is pleasant left
+to tell.  Where was I?"
+
+"Painting, so long as it was light--"
+
+"To be sure--I remember.  It began to grow dark.  Then lamps were brought
+in, large ones, and as many as I wished for.      Just before sunset
+Seleukus, Korinna's father, came in to look upon his daughter once more.
+He bore his grief with dignified composure; yet by his child's bier he
+found it hard to be calm. But you can imagine all that.  He invited me to
+eat, and the food they brought might have tempted a full man to excess,
+but I could only swallow a few mouthfuls.  Berenike--the mother--did not
+even moisten her lips, but Seleukus did duty for us both, and this I
+could see displeased his wife.  During supper the merchant made many
+inquiries about me and my father; for he had heard Philip's praises from
+his brother Theophilus, the high-priest.  I learned from him that Korinna
+had caught her sickness from a slave girl she had nursed, and had died of
+the fever in three days.  But while I sat listening to him, as he talked
+and ate, I could not keep my eyes off his wife who reclined opposite to
+me silent and motionless, for the gods had created Korinna in her very
+image.  The lady Berenike's eyes indeed sparkle with a lurid, I might
+almost say an alarming, fire, but they are shaped like Korinna's.  I said
+so, and asked whether they were of the same color; I wanted to know for
+my portrait.  On this Seleukus referred me to a picture painted by old
+Sosibius, who has lately gone to Rome to work in Caesar's new baths.  He
+last year painted the wall of a room in the mer chant's country house at
+Kanopus.  In the center of the picture stands Galatea, and I know it now
+to be a good and true likeness.
+
+"The picture I finished that evening is to be placed at the head of the
+young girl's sarcophagus; but I am to keep it two days longer, to
+reproduce a second likeness more at my leisure, with the help of the
+Galatea, which is to remain in Seleukus's town house.
+
+"Then he left me alone with his wife.
+
+"What a delightful commission!  I set to work with renewed pleasure, and
+more composure than at first.  I had no need to hurry, for the first
+picture is to be hidden in the tomb, and I could give all my care to the
+second.  Besides, Korinna's features were indelibly impressed on my eye.
+
+"I generally can not paint at all by lamp-light; but this time I found no
+difficulty, and I soon recovered that blissful, solemn mood which I had
+felt in the presence of the dead.  Only now and then it was clouded by a
+sigh, or a faint moan from Berenike: 'Gone, gone!  There is no comfort--
+none, none!'
+
+"And what could I answer?  When did Death ever give back what he has
+snatched away?
+
+"' I can not even picture her as she was,' she murmured sadly to herself
+--but this I might remedy by the help of my art, so I painted on with
+increasing zeal; and at last her lamentations ceased to trouble me, for
+she fell asleep, and her handsome head sank on her breast.  The watchers,
+too, had dropped asleep, and only their deep breathing broke the
+stillness.
+
+"Suddenly it flashed upon me that I was alone with Korinna, and the
+feeling grew stronger and stronger; I fancied her lovely lips had moved,
+that a smile gently parted them, inviting me to kiss them.  As often as I
+looked at them--and they bewitched me--I saw and felt the same, and at
+last every impulse within me drove me toward her, and I could no longer
+resist: my lips pressed hers in a kiss!"
+
+Melissa softly sighed, but the artist did not hear; he went on: "And in
+that kiss I became hers; she took the heart and soul of me.  I can no
+longer escape from her; awake or asleep, her image is before my eyes, and
+my spirit is in her power."
+
+Again he drank, emptying the cup at one deep gulp.  Then he went on:
+"So be it!  Who sees a god, they say, must die.  And it is well, for he
+has known something more glorious than other men.  Our brother Philip,
+too, lives with his heart in bonds to that one alone, unless a demon has
+cheated his senses.  I am troubled about him, and you must help me."
+
+He sprang up, pacing the room again with long strides, but his sister
+clung to his arm and besought him to shake off the bewitching vision.
+How earnest was her prayer, what eager tenderness rang in her every word,
+as she entreated him to tell her when and where her elder brother, too,
+had met the daughter of Seleukus!
+
+The artist's soft heart was easily moved.  Stroking the hair of the
+loving creature at his side--so helpful as a rule, but now bewildered
+--he tried to calm her by affecting a lighter mood than he really felt,
+assuring her that he should soon recover his usual good spirits.  She
+knew full well, he said, that his living loves changed in frequent
+succession, and it would be strange indeed if a dead one could bind him
+any longer.  And his adventure, so far as it concerned the house of
+Seleukus, ended with that kiss; for the lady Berenike had presently
+waked, and urged him to finish the portrait at his own house.
+
+Next morning he had completed it with the help of the Galatea in the
+villa at Kanopus, and he had heard a great deal about the dead maiden.
+A young woman who was left in charge of the villa had supplied him with
+whatever he needed.  Her pretty face was swollen with weeping, and it was
+in a voice choked with tears that she had told him that her husband, who
+was a centurion in Caesar's pretorian guard, would arrive to-morrow or
+next day at Alexandria, with his imperial master.  She had not seen him
+for a long time, and had an infant to show him which he had not yet seen;
+and yet she could not be glad, for her young mistress's death had
+extinguished all her joy.
+
+"The affection which breathed in every word of the centurion's wife,"
+Alexander said, "helped me in my work.  I could be satisfied with the
+result.
+
+"The picture is so successful that I finished that for Seleukus in all
+confidence, and for the sarcophagus I will copy it as well or as ill as
+time will allow.  It will hardly be seen in the half-dark tomb, and how
+few will ever go to see it!  None but a Seleukus can afford to employ so
+costly a brush as your brother's is--thank the Muses!  But the second
+portrait is quite another thing, for that may chance to be hung next a
+picture by Apelles; and it must restore to the parents so much of their
+lost child as it lies in my power to give them.  So, on my way, I made up
+my mind to begin the copy at once by lamp-light, for it must be ready by
+to-morrow night at latest.
+
+"I hurried to my work-room,  and my slave placed the picture on an easel,
+while I welcomed my brother Philip who had come to see me, and who had
+lighted a lamp, and of course had brought a book.  He was so absorbed in
+it that he did not observe that I had come in till I addressed him.  Then
+I told him whence I came and what had happened, and he thought it all
+very strange and interesting.
+
+"He was as usual rather hurried and hesitating, not quite clear, but
+understanding it all.  Then he began telling me something about a
+philosopher who has just come to the front, a porter by trade, from whom
+he had heard sundry wonders, and it was not till Syrus brought me in a
+supper of oysters--for I could still eat nothing more solid--that he
+asked to see the portrait.
+
+"I pointed to the easel, and watched him; for the harder he is to please,
+the more I value his opinion.  This time I felt confident of praise, or
+even of some admiration, if only for the beauty of the model.
+
+"He threw off the veil from the picture with a hasty movement, but,
+instead of gazing at it calmly, as he is wont, and snapping out his sharp
+criticisms, he staggered backward, as though the noonday sun had dazzled
+his sight.  Then, bending forward, he stared at the painting, panting as
+he might after racing for a wager.  He stood in perfect silence, for I
+know not how long, as though it were Medusa he was gazing on, and when at
+last he clasped his hand to his brow, I called him by name.  He made no
+reply, but an impatient 'Leave me alone!' and then he still gazed at the
+face as though to devour it with his eyes, and without a sound.
+
+"I did not disturb him; for, thought I, he too is bewitched by the
+exquisite beauty of those virgin features.  So we were both silent, till
+he asked, in a choked voice: 'And did you paint that?  Is that, do you
+say, the daughter that Seleukus has just lost?'
+
+"Of course I said 'Yes'; but then he turned on me in a rage, and
+reproached me bitterly for deceiving and cheating him, and jesting with
+things that to him were sacred, though I might think them a subject for
+sport.
+
+"I assured him that my answer was as earnest as it was accurate, and that
+every word of my story was true.
+
+"This only made him more furious.  I, too, began to get angry, and as he,
+evidently deeply agitated, still persisted in saying that my picture
+could not have been painted from the dead Korinna, I swore to him
+solemnly, with the most sacred oath I could think of, that it was really
+so.
+
+"On this he declared to me in words so tender and touching as I never
+before heard from his lips, that if I were deceiving him his peace of
+mind would be forever destroyed-nay, that he feared for his reason; and
+when I had repeatedly assured him, by the memory of our departed mother,
+that I had never dreamed of playing a trick upon him, he shook his head,
+grasped his brow, and turned to leave the room without another word."
+
+"And you let him go?" cried Melissa, in anxious alarm.
+
+"Certainly not," replied the painter.  "On the contrary, I stood in his
+way, and asked him whether he had known Korinna, and what all this might
+mean.  But he would make no reply, and tried to pass me and get away.
+It must have been a strange scene, for we two big men struggled as if we
+were at a wrestling-match.  I got him down with one hand behind his
+knees, and so he had to remain; and when I had promised to let him go, he
+confessed that he had seen Korinna at the house of her uncle, the high-
+priest, without knowing who she was or even speaking a word to her.  And
+he, who usually flees from every creature wearing a woman's robe, had
+never forgotten that maiden and her noble beauty; and, though he did not
+say so, it was obvious, from every word, that he was madly in love.
+Her eyes had followed him wherever he went, and this he deemed a great
+misfortune, for it had disturbed his power of thought.  A month since he
+went across Lake Mareotis to Polybius to visit Andreas, and while, on his
+return, he was standing on the shore, he saw her again, with an old man
+in white robes.  But the last time he saw her was on the morning of the
+very day when all this happened; and if he is to be believed, he not only
+saw her but touched her hand.  That, again, was by the lake; she was just
+stepping out of the ferry-boat.  The obolus she had ready to pay the
+oarsman dropped on the ground, and Philip picked it up and returned it
+to her.  Then his fingers touched hers.  He could feel it still, he
+declared, and yet she had then ceased to walk among the living.
+
+"Then it was my turn to doubt his word; but he maintained that his story
+was true in every detail; he would hear nothing said about some one
+resembling her, or anything of the kind, and spoke of daimons showing
+him false visions, to cheat him and hinder him from working out his
+investigations of the real nature of things to a successful issue.  But
+this is in direct antagonism to his views of daimons; and when at last he
+rushed out of the house, he looked like one possessed of evil spirits.
+
+"I hurried after him, but he disappeared down a dark alley.  Then I had
+enough to do to finish my copy, and yesterday I carried it home to
+Seleukus.
+
+"Then I had time to look for Philip, but I could hear nothing of him,
+either in his own lodgings or at the Museum.  To-day I have been hunting
+for him since early in the morning.  I even forgot to lay any flowers on
+my mother's grave, as usual on the day of the Nekysia, because I was
+thinking only of him.  But he no doubt is gone to the city of the dead;
+for, on my way hither, as I was ordering a garland in the flower-market,
+pretty little Doxion showed me two beauties which she had woven for him,
+and which he is presently to fetch.  So he must now be in the Nekropolis;
+and I know for whom he intends the second; for the door-keeper at
+Seleukus's house told me that a man, who said he was my brother, had
+twice called, and had eagerly inquired whether my picture had yet been
+attached to Korinna's sarcophagus.  The old man told him it had not,
+because, of course, the embalming could not be complete as yet.  But the
+picture was to be displayed to-day, as being the feast of the dead, in
+the hall of the embalmers.  That was the plan, I know.  So, now, child,
+set your wise little woman's head to work, and devise something by which
+he may be brought to his senses, and released from these crazy
+imaginings."
+
+"The first thing to be done," Melissa exclaimed, "is to follow him and
+talk to him.-Wait a moment; I must speak a word to the slaves.  My
+father's night-draught can be mixed in a minute.  He might perhaps return
+home before us, and I must leave his couch--I will be with you in a
+minute."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+The brother and sister had walked some distance.  The roads were full of
+people, and the nearer they came to the Nekropolis the denser was the
+throng.
+
+As they skirted the town walls they took counsel together.
+
+Being perfectly agreed that the girl who had touched Philip's hand could
+certainly be no daimon who had assumed Korinna's form, they were inclined
+to accept the view that a strong resemblance had deceived their brother.
+They finally decided that Alexander should try to discover the maiden who
+so strangely resembled the dead; and the artist was ready for the task,
+for he could only work when his heart was light, and had never felt such
+a weight on it before.  The hope of meeting with a living creature who
+resembled that fair dead maiden, combined with his wish to rescue his
+brother from the disorder of mind which threatened him; and Melissa
+perceived with glad surprise how quickly this new object in life restored
+the youth's happy temper.
+
+It was she who spoke most, and Alexander, whom nothing escaped that had
+any form of beauty, feasted his ear on the pearly ring of her voice.
+
+"And her face is to match," thought he as they went on in the darkness;
+"and may the Charites who have endowed her with every charm, forgive my
+father for burying her as he does his gold."
+
+It was not in his nature to keep anything that stirred him deeply to
+himself, when he was in the society of another, so he murmured to his
+sister: "It is just as well that the Macedonian youths of this city
+should not be able to see what a jewel our old man's house contains.
+--Look how brightly Selene shines on us, and how gloriously the stars
+burn!  Nowhere do the heavens blaze more brilliantly than here.  As soon
+as we come out of the shadow that the great walls cast on the road we
+shall be in broad light.  There is the Serapeum rising out of the
+darkness.  They are rehearsing the great illumination which is to dazzle
+the eyes of Caesar when he comes.  But they must show too, that to-night,
+at least, the gods of the nether world and death are all awake.  You can
+never have been in the Nekropolis at so late an hour before."
+
+"How should I?" replied the girl.  And he expressed the pleasure that it
+gave him to be able to show her for the first time the wonderful night
+scene of such a festival.  And when he heard the deep-drawn "Ah!" with
+which she hailed the sight of the greatest temple of all, blazing in the
+midst of the darkness with tar-pans, torches, and lamps innumerable, he
+replied with as much pride and satisfaction as though she owed the
+display to him, "Ay, what do you think of that?"
+
+Above the huge stone edifice which was thus lighted up, the dome of the
+Serapeum rose high into the air, its summit appearing to touch the sky.
+Never had the gigantic structure seemed so beautiful to the girl, who had
+only seen it by daylight; for under the illumination, arranged by a
+master-hand, every line stood out more clearly than in the sunlight; and
+in the presence of this wonderful sight Melissa's impressionable young
+soul forgot the trouble that had weighed on it, and her heart beat
+higher.
+
+Her lonely life with her father had hitherto fully satisfied her, and she
+had, never yet dreamed of anything better in the future than a quiet and
+modest existence, caring for him and her brothers; but now she thankfully
+experienced the pleasure of seeing for once something really grand and
+fine, and rejoiced at having escaped for a while from the monotony of
+each day and hour.
+
+Once, too, she had been with her brothers and Diodoros, Alexander's
+greatest friend, to see a wild-beast fight, followed by a combat of
+gladiators; but she had come home frightened and sorrowful, for what she
+had seen had horrified more than it had interested her.  Some of the
+killed and tortured beings haunted her mind; and, besides, sitting in the
+lowest and best seats belonging to Diodoros's wealthy father, she had
+been stared at so boldly and defiantly whenever she raised her eyes, by a
+young gallant opposite, that she had felt vexed and insulted; nay, had
+wished above all things to get home as soon as possible.  And yet she had
+loved Diodoros from her childhood, and she would have enjoyed sitting
+quietly by his side more than looking on at the show.
+
+But on this occasion her curiosity was gratified, and the hope of being
+able to help one who was dear to her filled her with quiet gladness.
+It was a comfort to her, too, to find herself once more by her mother's
+grave with Alexander, who was her especial friend.  She could never come
+here often enough, and the blessing which emanated from it--of that she
+was convinced--must surely fall on her brother also, and avert from him
+all that grieved his heart.
+
+As they walked on between the Serapeum on one hand, towering high above
+all else, and the Stadium on the other, the throng was dense; on the
+bridge over the canal it was difficult to make any progress.  Now, as the
+full moon rose, the sacrifices and games in honor of the gods of the
+under world were beginning, and now the workshops and factories had
+emptied themselves into the streets already astir for the festival of the
+dead, so every moment the road became more crowded.
+
+Such a tumult was generally odious to her retiring nature; but to-night
+she felt herself merely one drop in the great, flowing river, of which
+every other drop felt the same impulse which was carrying her forward to
+her destination.  The desire to show the dead that they were not
+forgotten, that their favor was courted and hoped for, animated men and
+women, old and young alike.
+
+There were few indeed who had not a wreath or a posy in their hands, or
+carried behind them by a slave.  In front of the brother and sister was a
+large family of children.  A black nurse carried the youngest on her
+shoulder, and an ass bore a basket in which were flowers for the tomb,
+with a wineflask and eatables.  A memorial banquet was to be held at the
+grave of their ancestors; and the little one, whose golden head rose
+above the black, woolly poll of the negress, nodded gayly in response to
+Melissa's smiles.  The children were enchanted at the prospect of a meal
+at such an unusual hour, and their parents rejoiced in them and in the
+solemn pleasure they anticipated.
+
+Many a one in this night of remembrance only cared to recall the happy
+hours spent in the society of the beloved dead; others hoped to leave
+their grief and pain behind them, and find fresh courage and contentment
+in the City of the Dead; for tonight the gates of the nether world stood
+open, and now, if ever, the gods that reigned there would accept the
+offerings and hear the prayers of the devout.
+
+Those lean Egyptians, who pushed past in silence and haranging their
+heads, were no doubt bent on carrying offerings to Osiris and Anubis--for
+the festival of the gods of death and resurrection coincided with the
+Nekysia--and on winning their favors by magical formulas and spells.
+
+Everything was plainly visible, for the desert tract of the Nekropolis,
+where at this hour utter darkness and silence usually reigned, was
+brightly lighted up.  Still, the blaze failed to banish entirely the
+thrill of fear which pervaded the spot at night; for the unwonted glare
+dazzled and bewildered the bats and night-birds, and they fluttered about
+over the heads of the intruders in dark, ghostly flight.  Many a one
+believed them to be the unresting souls of condemned sinners, and looked
+up at them with awe.
+
+Melissa drew her veil closer and clung more tightly to her brother, for a
+sound of singing and wild cries, which she had heard behind her for some
+time, was now coming closer.  They were no longer treading the paved
+street, but the hard-beaten soil of the desert.  The crush was over, for
+here the crowd could spread abroad; but the uproarious troop, which she
+did not even dare to look at, came rushing past quite close to them.
+They were Greeks, of all ages and of both sexes.  The men flourished
+torches, and were shouting a song with unbridled vehemence; the women,
+wearing garlands, kept up with them.  What they carried in the baskets
+on their heads could not be seen, nor did Alexander know; for so many
+religious brotherhoods and mystic societies existed here that it was
+impossible to guess to which this noisy troop might belong.
+
+The pair had presently overtaken a little train of white-robed men moving
+forward at a solemn pace, whom the painter recognized as the
+philosophical and religious fraternity of the Neo-Pythagoreans, when a
+small knot of men and women in the greatest excitement came rushing past
+as if they were mad.  The men wore the loose red caps of their Phrygian
+land; the women carried bowls full of fruits.  Some beat small drums,
+others clanged cymbals, and each hauled his neighbor along with deafening
+cries, faster and faster, till the dust hid them from sight and a new din
+drowned the last, for the votaries of Dionysus were already close upon
+them, and vied with the Phrygians in uproariousness.  But this wild troop
+remained behind; for one of the light-colored oxen, covered with
+decorations, which was being driven in the procession by a party of men
+and boys, to be presently sacrificed, had broken away, maddened by the
+lights and the shouting, and had to be caught and led again.
+
+At last they reached the graveyard.  But even now they could not make
+their way to the long row of houses where the embalmers dwelt, for an
+impenetrable mass of human beings stood pent up in front of them, and
+Melissa begged her brother to give her a moment's breathing space.
+
+All she had seen and heard on the way had excited her greatly; but she
+had scarcely for a moment forgotten what it was that had brought her out
+so late, who it was that she sought, or that it would need her utmost
+endeavor to free him from the delusion that had fooled him.  In this
+dense throng and deafening tumult it was scarcely possible to recover
+that collected calm which she had found in the morning at her mother's
+tomb.  In that, doubt had had no part, and the delightful feeling of
+freedom which had shone on her soul, now shrank deep into the shade
+before a growing curiosity and the longing for her usual repose.
+
+If her father were to find her here!  When she saw a tall figure
+resembling his cross the torchlight, all clouded as it was by the dust,
+she drew her brother away behind the stall of a seller of drinks and
+other refreshments.  The father, at any rate, must be spared the distress
+she felt about Philip, who was his favorite.  Besides, she knew full well
+that, if he met her here, he would at once take her home.
+
+The question now was where Philip might be found.
+
+They were standing close to the booths where itinerant dealers sold
+food and liquors of every description, flowers and wreaths, amulets and
+papyrus-leaves, with strange charms written on them to secure health for
+the living and salvation for the souls of the dead.  An astrologer,
+who foretold the course of a man's life from the position of the planets,
+had erected a high platform with large tables displayed to view, and the
+instrument wherewith he aimed at the stars as it were with a bow; and his
+Syrian slave, accompanying himself on a gayly-painted drum, proclaimed
+his master's powers.  There were closed tents in which magical remedies
+were to be obtained, though their open sale was forbidden by the
+authorities, from love-philters to the wondrous fluid which, if rightly
+applied, would turn lead, copper, or silver to gold.  Here, old women
+invited the passer-by to try Thracian and other spells; there, magicians
+stalked to and fro in painted caps and flowing, gaudy robes, most of them
+calling themselves priests of some god of the abyss.  Men of every race
+and tongue that dwelt in the north of Africa, or on the shores of the
+Mediterranean, were packed in a noisy throng.
+
+The greatest press was behind the houses of the men who buried the dead.
+Here sacrifices were offered on the altars of Serapis, Isis, and Anubis;
+here the sacred sistrum of Isis might be kissed; here hundreds of priests
+performed solemn ceremonies, and half of those who came hither for the
+festival of the dead collected about them.  The mysteries were also
+performed here, beginning before midnight; and a dramatic representation
+might be seen of the woes of Isis, and the resurrection of her husband
+Osiris.  But neither here, nor at the stalls, nor among the graves, where
+many families were feasting by torchlight and pouring libations in the
+sand for the souls of the dead, did Alexander expect to find his brother.
+Nor would Philip be attending the mysterious solemnities of any of the
+fraternities.  He had witnessed them often enough with his friend
+Diodoros, who never missed the procession to Eleusis, because, as he
+declared, the mysteries of Demeter alone could assure a man of the
+immortality of the soul.  The wild ceremonies of the Syrians, who maimed
+themselves in their mad ecstasy, repelled him as being coarse and
+barbarous.
+
+As she made her way through this medley of cults, this worship of gods
+so different that they were in some cases hostile, but more often merged
+into each other, Melissa wondered to which she ought to turn in her
+present need.  Her mother had best loved to sacrifice to Serapis and
+Isis.  But since, in her last sickness, Melissa had offered everything
+she possessed to these divinities of healing, and all in vain, and since
+she had heard things in the Serapeum itself which even now brought a
+blush to her cheek, she had turned away from the great god of the
+Alexandrians.  Though he who had offended her by such base proposals was
+but a priest of the lower grade--and indeed, though she knew it not, was
+since dead--she feared meeting him again, and had avoided the sanctuary
+where he officiated.
+
+She was a thorough Alexandrian, and had been accustomed from childhood to
+listen to the philosophical disputations of the men about her.  So she
+perfectly understood her brother Philip, the skeptic, when he said that
+he by no means denied the existence of the immortals, but that, on the
+other hand, he could not believe in it; that thought brought him no
+conviction; that man, in short, could be sure of nothing, and so could
+know nothing whatever of the divinity.  He had even denied, on logical
+grounds, the goodness and omnipotence of the gods, the wisdom and fitness
+of the ordering of the universe, and Melissa was proud of her brother's
+acumen; but what appeals to the brain only, and not to the heart, can not
+move a woman to anything great--least of all to a decisive change of life
+or feeling.  So the girl had remained constant to her mother's faith in
+some mighty powers outside herself, which guided the life of Nature and
+of human beings.  Only she did not feel that she had found the true god,
+either in Serapis or Isis, and so she had sought others.  Thus she had
+formulated a worship of ancestors, which, as she had learned from the
+slave-woman of her friend Ino, was not unfamiliar to the Egyptians.
+
+In Alexandria there were altars to every god, and worship in every form.
+Hers, however, was not among them, for the genius of her creed was the
+enfranchised soul of her mother, who had cast off the burden of this
+perishable body.  Nothing had ever come from her that was not good and
+lovely; and she knew that if her mother were permitted, even in some
+other than human form, she would never cease to watch over her with
+tender care.
+
+And those initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, as Diodoros had told
+her, desired the immortality of the soul, to the end that they might
+continue to participate in the life of those whom they had left behind.
+What was it that brought such multitudes at this time out to the
+Nekropolis, with their hands full of offerings, but the consciousness
+of their nearness to the dead, and of being cared for by them so long as
+they were not forgotten?  And even if the glorified spirit of her mother
+were not permitted to hear her prayers, she need not therefore cease to
+turn to her; for it comforted her unspeakably to be with her in spirit,
+and to confide to her all that moved her soul.  And so her mother's tomb
+had become her favorite place of rest.  Here, if anywhere, she now hoped
+once more to find comfort, some happy suggestion, and perhaps some
+definite assistance.
+
+She begged Alexander to take her thither, and he consented, though he was
+of opinion that Philip would be found in the mortuary chamber, in the
+presence of Korinna's portrait.
+
+It was not easy to force their way through the thousands who had come out
+to the great show this night; however, most of the visitors were
+attracted by the mysteries far away from the Macedonian burial-ground,
+and there was little to disturb the silence near the fine marble monument
+which Alexander, to gratify his father, had erected with his first large
+earnings.  It was hung with various garlands, and Melissa, before she
+prayed and anointed the stone, examined them with eye and hand.
+
+Those which she and her father had placed there she recognized at once.
+That humble garland of reeds with two lotus-flowers was the gift of their
+old slave Argutis and his wife Dido.  This beautiful wreath of choice
+flowers had come from the garden of a neighbor who had loved her mother
+well; and that splendid basketful of lovely roses, which had not been
+there this morning, had been placed here by Andreas, steward to the
+father of her young friend Diodoros, although he was of the Christian
+sect.  And these were all.  Philip had not been here then, though it was
+now past midnight.
+
+For the first time in his life he had let this day pass by without a
+thought for their dead.  How bitterly this grieved Melissa, and even
+added to her anxiety for him!
+
+It was with a heavy heart that she and Alexander anointed the tombstone;
+and while Melissa uplifted her hands in prayer, the painter stood in
+silence, his eyes fixed on the ground.  But no sooner had she let them
+fall, than he exclaimed:
+
+"He is here, I am sure, and in the house of the embalmers.  That he
+ordered two wreaths is perfectly certain; and if he meant one for
+Korinna's picture, he surely intended the other for our mother.  If he
+has offered both to the young girl--"
+
+"No, no!" Melissa put in.  "He will bring his gift.  Let us wait here a
+little while, and do you, too, pray to the manes of our mother.  Do it to
+please me."
+
+But her brother interrupted her eagerly  I think of her wherever I may
+be; for those we truly love always live for us.  Not a day passes, nor if
+I come in sober, not a night, when I do not see her dear face, either
+waking or dreaming.  Of all things sacred, the thought of her is the
+highest; and if she had been raised to divine honors like the dead
+Caesars who have brought so many curses on the world--"
+
+"Hush--don't speak so  loud!"  said Melissa, seriously, for men were
+moving to and fro among the tombs, and Roman guards kept watch over the
+populace.
+
+But the rash youth went on in the same tone:
+
+"I would worship her gladly, though I have forgotten how to pray.  For
+who can tell here--unless he follows the herd and worships Serapis--who
+can tell to which god of them all he shall turn when he happens to be at
+his wits' end?  While my mother lived, I, like you, could gladly worship
+and sacrifice to the immortals; but Philip has spoiled me for all that.
+As to the divine Caesars, every one thinks as I do.  My mother would
+sooner have entered a pesthouse than the banqueting-hall where they
+feast, on Olympus.  Caracalla among the gods!  Why, Father Zeus cast his
+son Hephaistos on earth from the height of Olympus, and only broke his
+leg; but our Caesar accomplished a more powerful throw, for he cast his
+brother through the earth into the nether world--an imperial thrust--and
+not merely lamed him but killed him."
+
+"Well done!"  said a deep voice, interrupting the young artist.  "Is that
+you, Alexander?  Hear what new titles to fame Heron's son can find for
+the imperial guest who is to arrive to-morrow."
+
+"Pray hush!" Melissa besought him, looking up at the bearded man who had
+laid his arm on Alexander's shoulder.  It was Glaukias the sculptor, her
+father's tenant; for his work-room stood on the plot of ground by the
+garden of Hermes, which the gem-cutter had inherited from his father-in-
+law.
+
+The man's bold, manly features were flushed with wine and revelry; his
+twinkling eyes sparkled, and the ivy-leaves still clinging to his curly
+hair showed that he had been one in the Dionysiac revellers; but the
+Greek blood which ran in his veins preserved his grace even in
+drunkenness.  He bowed gayly to the young girl, and exclaimed to his
+companions:
+
+"The youngest pearl in Alexandria's crown of beauties!" while Bion,
+Alexander's now gray-haired master, clapped the youth on the arm, and
+added: "Yes, indeed, see what the little thing has grown!  Do you
+remember, pretty one, how you once--how many years ago, I wonder?--
+spotted your little white garments all over with red dots!  I can see you
+now, your tiny finger plunged into the pot of paint, and then carefully
+printing off the round pattern all over the white linen.  Why, the little
+painter has become a Hebe, a Charis, or, better still, a sweetly dreaming
+Psyche."
+
+"Ay, ay!" said Glaukias again.  "My worthy landlord has a charming model.
+He has not far to seek for a head for his best gems.  His son, a Helios,
+or the great Macedonian whose name he bears; his daughter--you are right,
+Bion--the maid beloved of Eros.  Now, if you can make verses, my young
+friend of the Muses, give us an epigram in a line or two which we may
+bear in mind as a compliment to our imperial visitor."
+
+"But not here--not in the burial-ground," Melissa urged once more.
+
+Among Glaukias's companions was Argeios, a vain and handsome young poet,
+with scented locks betraying him from afar, who was fain to display the
+promptness of his poetical powers; and, even while the elder artist was
+speaking, he had run Alexander's satirical remarks into the mold of
+rhythm.  Not to save his life could he have suppressed the hastily
+conceived distich, or have let slip such a justifiable claim to applause.
+So, without heeding Melissa's remonstrance, he flung his sky-blue mantle
+about him in fresh folds, and declaimed with comical emphasis:
+
+    "Down to earth did the god cast his son: but with mightier hand
+     Through it, to Hades, Caesar flung his brother the dwarf."
+
+The versifier was rewarded by a shout of laughter, and, spurred by the
+approval of his friends, he declared he had hit on the mode to which to
+sing his lines, as he did in a fine, full voice.
+
+But there was another poet, Mentor, also of the party, and as he could
+not be happy under his rival's triumph, he exclaimed: "The great dyer--
+for you know he uses blood instead of the Tyrian shell--has nothing of
+Father Zeus about him that I can see, but far more of the great
+Alexander, whose mausoleum he is to visit to-morrow.  And if you would
+like to know wherein the son of Severus resembles the giant of Macedon,
+you shall hear."
+
+He thrummed his thyrsus as though he struck the strings of a lyre, and,
+having ended the dumb prelude, he sang:
+
+         "Wherein hath the knave Caracalla outdone Alexander?
+          He killed a brother, the hero a friend, in his rage."
+
+These lines, however, met with no applause; for they were not so lightly
+improvised as the former distich, and it was clumsy and tasteless, as
+well as dangerous thus to name, in connection with such a jest, the
+potentate at whom it was aimed.  And the fears of the jovial party were
+only too well founded, for a tall, lean Egyptian suddenly stood among the
+Greeks as if he had sprung from the earth.  They were sobered at once,
+and, like a swarm of pigeons on which a hawk swoops down, they dispersed
+in all directions.
+
+Melissa beckoned to her brother to follow her; but the Egyptian intruder
+snatched the mantle, quick as lightning, from Alexander's shoulders, and
+ran off with it to the nearest pine-torch.  The young man hurried after
+the thief, as he supposed him to be, but there the spy flung the cloak
+back to him, saying, in a tone of command, though not loud, for there
+were still many persons among the graves:
+
+"Hands off, son of Heron, unless you want me to call the watch!  I have
+seen your face by the light, and that is enough for this time.  Now we
+know each other, and we shall meet again in another place!"
+
+With these words he vanished in the darkness, and Melissa asked, in great
+alarm:
+
+"In the name of all the gods, who was that?"
+
+"Some rascally carpenter, or scribe, probably, who is in the service of
+the night-watch as a spy.  At least those sort of folks are often built
+askew, as that scoundrel was," replied Alexander, lightly.  But he knew
+the man only too well.  It was Zminis, the chief of the spies to the
+night patrol; a man who was particularly inimical to Heron, and whose
+hatred included the son, by whom he had been befooled and misled in more
+than one wild ploy with his boon companions.  This spy, whose cruelty and
+cunning were universally feared, might do him a serious mischief, and he
+therefore did not tell his sister, to whom the name of Zminis was well
+known, who the listener was.
+
+He cut short all further questioning by desiring her to come at once to
+the mortuary hall.
+
+"And if we do not find him there," she said, "let us go home at once; I
+am so frightened."
+
+"Yes, yes," said her brother, vaguely.  "If only we could meet some one
+you could join."
+
+"No, we will keep together," replied Melissa, decisively; and simply
+assenting, with a brief "All right," the painter drew her arm through
+his, and they made their way through the now thinning crowd.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+The houses of the embalmers, which earlier in the evening had shone
+brightly out of the darkness, now made a less splendid display.  The dust
+kicked up by the crowd dimmed the few lamps and torches which had not by
+this time burned out or been extinguished, and an oppressive atmosphere
+of balsamic resin and spices met the brother and sister on the very
+threshold.  The vast hall which they now entered was one of a long row of
+buildings of unburned bricks; but the Greeks insisted on some
+ornamentation of the simplest structure, if it served a public purpose,
+and the embalming-houses had a colonnade along their front, and their
+walls were covered with stucco, painted in gaudy colors, here in the
+Egyptian and there in the Greek taste.  There were scenes from the
+Egyptian realm of the dead, and others from the Hellenic myths; for the
+painters had been enjoined to satisfy the requirements and views of
+visitors of every race.  The chief attraction, however, this night was
+within; for the men whose duties were exercised on the dead had displayed
+the finest and best of what they had to offer to their customers.
+
+The ancient Greek practice of burning the dead had died out under the
+Antonines.  Of old, the objects used to deck the pyre had also been on
+show here; now there was nothing to be seen but what related to interment
+or entombment.
+
+Side by side with the marble sarcophagus, or those of coarser stone, were
+wooden coffins and mummy-cases, with a place at the head for the portrait
+of the deceased.  Vases and jars of every kind, amulets of various forms,
+spices and balsams in vials and boxes, little images in burned clay of
+the gods and of men, of which none but the Egyptians knew the allegorical
+meaning, stood in long rows on low wooden shelves.  On the higher shelves
+were mummy bands and shrouds, some coarse, others of the very finest
+texture, wigs for the bald heads of shaven corpses, or woolen fillets,
+and simply or elaborately embroidered ribbons for the Greek dead.
+
+Nothing was lacking of the various things in use for decking the corpse
+of an Alexandrian, whatever his race or faith.
+
+Some mummy-cases, too, were there, ready to be packed off to other towns.
+The most costly were covered with fine red linen, wound about with
+strings of beads and gold ornaments, and with the name of the dead
+painted on the upper side.  In a long, narrow room apart hung the
+portraits, waiting to be attached to the upper end of the mummy-cases of
+those lately deceased, and still in the hands of embalmers.  Here, too,
+most of the lamps were out, and the upper end of the room was already
+dark.  Only in the middle, where the best pictures were on show, the
+lights had been renewed.
+
+The portraits were painted on thin panels of sycamore or of cypress, and
+in most of them the execution betrayed that their destiny was to be
+hidden in the gloom of a tomb.
+
+Alexander's portrait of Korinna was in the middle of the gallery, in a
+good light, and stood out from the paintings on each side of it as a
+genuine emerald amid green glass.  It was constantly surrounded by a
+crowd of the curious and connoisseurs.  They pointed out the beautiful
+work to each other; but, though most of them acknowledged the skill of
+the master who had painted it, many ascribed its superiority to the
+magical charm of the model.  One could see in those wonderfully
+harmonious features that Aristotle was right when he discerned beauty
+in order and proportion; while another declared that he found there the
+evidence of Plato's doctrine of the identity of the good and the
+beautiful--for this face was so lovely because it was the mirror of a
+soul which had been disembodied in the plenitude of maiden purity and
+virtue, unjarred by any discord; and this gave rise to a vehement
+discussion as to the essential nature of beauty and of virtue.
+
+Others longed to know more about the early-dead original of this
+enchanting portrait.  Korinna's wealthy father and his brothers were
+among the best-known men of the city.  The elder, Timotheus, was high-
+priest of the Temple of Serapis; and  Zeno,  the  younger,  had  set the
+whole world talking when he, who in his youth had been notoriously
+dissipated, had retired from any concern in the corn-trade carried on
+by his family, the greatest business of the kind in the world, perhaps,
+and--for this was an open secret--had been baptized.
+
+The body of the maiden, when embalmed and graced with her portrait, was
+to be transported to the family tomb in the district of Arsinoe, where
+they had large possessions, and the gossip of the embalmer was eagerly
+swallowed as he expatiated on the splendor with which her liberal father
+proposed to escort her thither.
+
+Alexander and Melissa had entered the portrait-gallery before the
+beginning of this narrative, and listened to it, standing behind several
+rows of gazers who were between them and the portrait.
+
+As the speaker ceased, the little crowd broke up, and when Melissa could
+at last see her brother's work at her ease, she stood speechless for some
+time; and then she turned to the artist, and exclaimed, from the depths
+of her heart, "Beauty is perhaps the noblest thing in the world!"
+
+"It is," replied Alexander, with perfect assurance.  And he, bewitched
+once more by the spell which had held him by Korinna's couch, gazed into
+the dark eyes in his own picture, whose living glance his had never met,
+and which he nevertheless had faithfully reproduced, giving them a look
+of the longing of a pure soul for all that is lovely and worthy.
+
+Melissa, an artist's daughter, as she looked at this portrait, understood
+what it was that had so deeply stirred her brother while he painted it;
+but this was not the place to tell him so.  She soon tore herself away,
+to look about for Philip once more and then to be taken home.
+
+Alexander, too, was seeking Philip; but, sharp as the artist's eyes were,
+Melissa's seemed to be keener, for, just as they were giving it up and
+turning to go, she pointed to a dark corner and said softly, "There he
+is."
+
+And there, in fact, her brother was, sitting with two men, one very tall
+and the other a little man, his brow resting on his hand in the deep
+shadow of a sarcophagus, between the wall and a mummy-case set on end,
+which till now had hidden him from Alexander and Melissa.
+
+Who could the man be who had kept the young philosopher, somewhat
+inaccessible in his pride of learning, so long in talk in that half-dark
+corner?  He was not one of the learned society at the Museum; Alexander
+knew them all.  Besides, he was not dressed like them, in the Greek
+fashion, but in the flowing robe of a Magian.  And the stranger was a
+man of consequence, for he wore his splendid garment with a superior air,
+and as Alexander approached him he remembered having somewhere seen this
+tall, bearded figure, with the powerful head garnished with flowing and
+carefully oiled black curls.  Such handsome and well-chiseled features,
+such fine eyes, and such a lordly, waving beard were not easily
+forgotten; his memory suddenly awoke and threw a light on the man as he
+sat in the gloom, and on the surroundings in which he had met him for the
+first time.
+
+It was at the feast of Dionysus.  Among a drunken crowd, which was
+rushing wildly along the streets, and which Alexander had joined, himself
+one of the wildest, this man had marched, sober and dignified as he was
+at this moment, in the same flowing raiment.  This had provoked the
+feasters, who, being full of wine and of the god, would have nothing that
+could remind them of the serious side of life.  Such sullen reserve on a
+day of rejoicing was an insult to the jolly giver of the fruits of the
+earth, and to wine itself, the care-killer; and the mad troop of artists,
+disguised as Silenus, satyrs, and fauns, had crowded round the stranger
+to compel him to join their rout and empty the wine-jar which a burly
+Silenus was carrying before him on his ass.
+
+At first the man had paid no heed to the youths' light mockery; but as
+they grew bolder, he suddenly stood still, seized the tall faun, who was
+trying to force the wine-jar on him, by both arms, and, holding him
+firmly, fixed his grave, dark eyes on those of the youth.  Alexander had
+not forgotten the half-comical, half-threatening incident, but what he
+remembered most clearly was the strange scene that followed: for, after
+the Magian had released his enemy, he bade him take the jar back to
+Silenus, and proceed on his way, like the ass, on all-fours.  And the
+tall faun, a headstrong, irascible Lesbian, had actually obeyed the
+stately despot, and crept along on his hands and feet by the side of the
+donkey.  No threats nor mockery of his companions could persuade him to
+rise.  The high spirits of the boisterous crew were quite broken, and
+before they could turn on the magician he had vanished.
+
+Alexander had afterward learned that he was Serapion, the star-gazer and
+thaumaturgist, whom all the spirits of heaven and earth obeyed.
+
+When, at the time, the painter had told the story to Philip, the
+philosopher had laughed at him, though Alexander had reminded him that
+Plato even had spoken of the daimons as being the guardian spirits of
+men; that in Alexandria, great and small alike believed in them as a fact
+to be reckoned with; and that he--Philip himself--had told him that they
+played a prominent part in the newest systems of philosophy.
+
+But to the skeptic nothing was sure: and if he would deny the existence
+of the Divinity, he naturally must disbelieve that of any beings in a
+sphere between the supersensual immortals and sentient human creatures.
+That a man, the weaker nature, could have any power over daimons, who,
+as having a nearer affinity to the gods, must, if they existed, be the
+stronger, he could refute with convincing arguments; and when he saw
+others nibbling whitethorn-leaves, or daubing their thresholds with pitch
+to preserve themselves and the house from evil spirits, he shrugged his
+shoulders contemptuously, though his father often did such things.
+
+Here was Philip, deep in conversation with the man he had mocked at, and
+Alexander was flattered by seeing that wise and famous Serapion, in whose
+powers he himself believed, was talking almost humbly to his brother, as
+though to a superior.  The magician was standing, while the philosopher,
+as though it were his right, remained seated.
+
+Of what could they be conversing?
+
+Alexander himself was anxious to be going, and only his desire to hear at
+any rate a few sentences of the talk of two such men detained him longer.
+
+As he expected, it bore on Serapion's magical powers; but the bearded man
+spoke in a very low tone, and if the painter ventured any nearer he would
+be seen.  He could only catch a few incoherent words, till Philip
+exclaimed in a louder voice: "All that is well-reasoned.  But you will be
+able to write an enduring inscription on the shifting wave sooner than
+you will shake my conviction that for our spirit, such as Nature has made
+it, there is nothing infallible or certain."
+
+The painter was familiar with this postulate, and was curious to hear the
+Magian's reply; but he could not follow his argument till he ended by
+saying, rather more emphatically: "You, even, do not deny the physical
+connection of things; but I know the power that causes it.  It is the
+magical sympathy which displays itself more powerfully in the universe,
+and among human beings, than any other force."
+
+"That is just what remains to be proved," was the reply.  But as the
+other declared in all confidence, "And I can prove it," and was
+proceeding to do so, Serapion's companion, a stunted, sharp-featured
+little Syrian, caught sight of Alexander.  The discourse was interrupted,
+and Alexander, pointing to Melissa, begged his brother to grant them a
+few minutes' speech with him.  Philip, however, scarcely spared a moment
+for greeting his brother and sister; and when, in answer to his request
+that they be brief in what they had to say, they replied that a few words
+would not suffice, Philip was for putting them off till the morrow, as he
+did not choose to be disturbed just now.
+
+At this Melissa took courage; she turned to Serapion and modestly
+addressed him:
+
+"You, sir, look like a grave, kind man, and seem to have a regard for my
+brother.  You, then, will help us, no doubt, to cure him of an illusion
+which troubles us.  A dead girl, he says, met him, and he touched her
+hand."
+
+"And do you, sweet child,  think  that impossible?"  the  Magian  asked
+with  gentle  gravity.  "Have the thousands who bring not merely fruit
+and wine and money for their dead, but who even burn a black sheep for
+them--you, perhaps, have done the same--have they, I ask, done this so
+long in vain?  I can not believe it.  Nay, I know from the ghosts
+themselves that this gives them pleasure; so they must have the organs of
+sense."
+
+"That we may rejoice departed souls by food and drink," said Melissa,
+eagerly, "and that daimons at times mingle with the living, every one of
+course, believes; but who ever heard that warm blood stirred in them?
+And how can it be possible that they should remunerate a service with
+money, which certainly was not coined in their airy realm, but in the
+mint here?"
+
+"Not too fast, fair maid," replied the Magian, raising a warning hand.
+"There is no form which these intermediate beings can not assume.  They
+have the control of all and everything which mortals may use, so the soul
+of Korinna revisiting these scenes may quite well have paid the ferryman
+with an obolus."
+
+"Then you know of it?" asked Melissa in surprise; but the Magian broke
+in, saying:
+
+"Few such things remain hidden from him who knows, not even the smallest,
+if he strives after such knowledge."
+
+As he spoke he gave the girl such a look as made her eyelids fall, and he
+went on with greater warmth: "There would be fewer tears shed by death-
+beds, my child, if we could but show the world the means by which the
+initiated hold converse with the souls of the dead."
+
+Melissa shook her pretty head sadly, and the Magian kindly stroked her
+waving hair; then, looking her straight in the eyes, he said: "The dead
+live.  What once has been can never cease to be, any more than out of
+nothing can anything come.  It is so simple; and so, too, are the
+workings of magic, which amaze you so much.  What you call magic, when I
+practice it, Eros, the great god of love, has wrought a thousand times in
+your breast.  When your heart leaps at your brother's caress, when the
+god's arrow pierces you, and the glance of a lover fills you with
+gladness, when the sweet harmonies of fine music wrap your soul above
+this earth, or the wail of a child moves you to compassion, you have felt
+the magic power stirring in your own soul.  You feel it when some
+mysterious power, without any will of your own, prompts you to some act,
+be it what it may.  And, besides all this, if a leaf flutters off the
+table without being touched by any visible hand, you do not doubt that a
+draught of air, which you can neither hear nor see, has swept through the
+room.  If at noon the world is suddenly darkened, you know, without
+looking up at the sky, that it is overcast by a cloud.  In the very same
+way you can feel the nearness of a soul that was dear to you without
+being able to see it.  All that is necessary is to strengthen the faculty
+which knows its presence, and give it the proper training, and then you
+will see and hear them.  The Magians have the key which unlocks the door
+of the world of spirits to the human senses.  Your noble brother, in whom
+the claims of the spirit have long since triumphed over those of sense,
+has found this key without seeking it, since he has been permitted to see
+Korinna's soul.  And if he follows a competent guide he will see her
+again."
+
+"But why?  What good will it do him?"  asked Melissa, with a reproachful
+and anxious look at the man whose influence, as she divined would be
+pernicious to her brother, in spite of his knowledge.  The Magian gave
+a compassionate shrug, and in the look he cast at the philosopher, the
+question was legible, "What have such as these to do with the highest
+things?"
+
+Philip nodded in impatient assent, and, without paying any further heed
+to his brother and sister, besought his friend to give him the proofs of
+the theory that the physical causation of things is weaker than the
+sympathy which connects them.  Melissa knew full well that any attempt
+now to separate Philip from Serapion would be futile; however, she would
+not leave the last chance untried, and asked him gravely whether he had
+forgotten his mother's tomb.
+
+He hastily assured her that he fully intended to visit it presently.
+Fruit and fragrant oil could be had here at any hour of the night.
+
+"And your two wreaths?"  she said, in mild reproach, for she had observed
+them both below the portrait of Korinna.
+
+"I had another use for them," he said, evasively; and then he added,
+apologetically: "You have brought flowers enough, I know.  If I can find
+time, I will go to-morrow to see my father."  He nodded to them both,
+turned to the Magian, and went on eagerly:
+
+"Then that magical sympathy--"
+
+They did not wait to hear the discussion; Alexander signed to his sister
+to follow him.
+
+He, too, knew that his brother's ear was deaf now to anything he could
+say.  What Serapion had said had riveted even his attention, and the
+question whether it might indeed be vouchsafed to living mortals to see
+the souls of the departed, and hear their voices, exercised his mind so
+greatly that he could not forbear asking his sister's opinion on such
+matters.
+
+But Melissa's good sense had felt that there was something not quite
+sound in the Magian's argument--nor did she conceal her conviction that
+Philip, who was always hard to convince, had accepted Serapion's views,
+not because he yielded to the weight of his reasons, but because he--and
+Alexander, too, for that matter--hoped by his mediation to see the
+beautiful Korinna again.
+
+This the artist admitted; but when he jested of the danger of a jealous
+quarrel between him and his brother, for the sake of a dead girl, there
+was something hard in his tone, and very unlike him, which Melissa did
+not like.
+
+They breathed more freely as they got out into the open air, and her
+efforts to change the subject of their conversation were happily
+seconded; for at the door they met the family of their neighbor Skopas,
+the owner of a stone-quarry, whose grave-plot adjoined theirs, and
+Melissa was happy again as she heard her brother laughing as gayly as
+ever with Skopas's pretty daughter.  The mania had not taken such deep
+hold of the light-hearted young painter as of Philip, the poring and
+gloomy philosopher; and she was glad as she heard her friend Ino call
+Alexander a faithless butterfly, while her sister Helena declared that he
+was a godless scoffer.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Man, in short, could be sure of nothing
+Misfortunes commonly come in couples yoked like oxen
+
+
+
+
+
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