which they naturally but erroneously
supposed him to be conversant, and worried him by continual nods and
titterings as they glanced at his nether extremities. To abolish this
nuisance, and at the same time silence sundry unpleasant rumours which had
somehow got abroad, Gerbert devised the ceremony of kissing the Pope's
feet, which, in a grievously mutilated form, endures to this day. The
stupefaction of the Cardinals on discovering that the Holy Father had lost
his hoof surpasses all description, and they went to their graves without
having obtained the least insight into the mystery.

THE CUPBEARER

The minister Photinius had fallen, to the joy of Constantinople. He had
taken sanctuary in the immense monastery adjoining the Golden Gate in the
twelfth region of the city, founded for a thousand monks by the patrician
Studius, in the year 463. There he occupied himself with the concoction of
poisons, the resource of fallen statesmen. When a defeated minister of our
own day is indisposed to accept his discomfiture, he applies himself to
poison the public mind, inciting the lower orders against the higher, and
blowing up every smouldering ember of sedition he can discover, trusting
that the conflagration thus kindled, though it consume the edifice of the
State, will not fail to roast his own egg. Photinius's conceptions of
mischief were less refined; he perfected his toxicological knowledge in the
medical laboratory of the monastery, and sought eagerly for an opportunity
of employing it; whether in an experiment upon the Emperor, or on his own
successor, or on some other personage, circumstances must determine.

The sanctity of Studius's convent, and the strength of its monastic
garrison, rendered it a safe refuge for disgraced courtiers, and in this
thirtieth year of the Emperor Basil the Second (reckoning from his nominal
accession) it harboured a legion of ex-prime ministers, patriarchs,
archbishops, chief secretaries, hypati, anthypati, silentiarii,
protospatharii, and even spatharo-candidati. And this small army was
nothing to the host that, maimed or blinded or tonsured or all three,
dragged out their lives in monasteries or in dungeons or on rocky islets;
and these again were few in comparison with the spirits of the traitors or
the betrayed who wailed nightly amid the planes and cypresses of the
Aretae, or stalked through the palatial apartments of verdantique and
porphyry. But of those comparatively at l