impid element. Recoiling in horror, he collected
all his energies, and with head depressed towards his chest, and hands
thrust forth as if to ward off pollution--butting, kicking, biting the
air--he rushed forwards, and with a preternatural force deserving to be
enumerated among his miracles, fairly overthrew the enormous vase, the
contents streaming on the crowd in front of the stage.

"Take me to my hermitage!" he screamed. "I renounce the bishopric. Take me
to my hermitage!"

"Amen," responded the demon, and, assuming his proper shape, he took
Pachymius upon his back and flew away with him amid the cheers of the
multitude.

Pachymius was speedily deposited at the mouth of his cavern, where he
received the visits of the neighbouring anchorites, who came to
congratulate him on the constancy with which he had sustained his fiery, or
rather watery trial. He spent most of his remaining days in the society of
the devil, on which account he was canonised at his death.

"O Phoebus," said Nonnus, when they were alone, "impose upon me any penance
thou wilt, so I may but regain thy favour and that of the Muses. But before
all things let me destroy my paraphrase."

"Thou shalt not destroy it," said Phoebus, "Thou shalt publish it. That
shall be thy penance."

And so it is that the epic on the exploits of Bacchus and the paraphrase of
St. John's Gospel have alike come down to us as the work of Nonnus, whose
authorship of both learned men have never been able to deny, having regard
to the similarity of style, but never could explain until the facts above
narrated came to light in one of the Fayoum papyri recently acquired by the
Archduke Rainer.

THE PURPLE HEAD

Half ignorant, they turned an easy wheel
That set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel.

I

In the heyday of the Emperor Aurelian's greatness, when his strong right
arm propped Rome up, and hewed Palmyra down, when he surrounded his capital
with walls fifty miles in circuit, and led Tetricus and Zenobia in triumph
through its streets, and distributed elephants among the senators, and laid
Etruria out in vineyards, and contemplated in leisure moments the
suppression of Christianity as a subordinate detail of administration, a
mere ripple on the broad ocean of his policy--at this period Bahram the
First, King of Persia, naturally became disquieted in his mind.

"This upstart soldier of fortune," reflected he, "has an unseemly habit of
overcom