nd constrained to wander in remote and insalubrious regions;
the one for advising a king, the other for instructing an emperor. But the
matter did not rest here. For Aurelian, having continued the visible deity
of half the world for one hundred and fifty days after the departure of
Sorianus, was slain by his own generals. To him succeeded Tacitus, who
sank oppressed by the weight of rule; to him Probus, who perished in a
military tumult; to him Carus, who was killed by lightning; to him Carinus,
who was assassinated by one whom he had wronged; to him Diocletian, who,
having maintained himself for twenty years, wisely forbore to tempt Nemesis
further, and retired to plant cabbages at Salona. All these sovereigns,
differing from each other in every other respect, agreed in a common desire
to possess the purple dye, and when the philosopher returned not,
successively despatched new emissaries in quest of it. Strange was the
diversity of fate which befell these envoys. Some fell into the jaws of
lions, some were crushed by monstrous serpents, some trampled by elephants
at the command of native princes, some perished of hunger, and some of
thirst; some, encountering smooth-browed and dark-tressed girls wreathing
their hair with the champak blossom or bathing by moonlight in
lotus-mantled tanks, forsook their quest, and led thenceforth idyllic lives
in groves of banian and of palm. Some became enamoured of the principles of
the Gymnosophists, some couched themselves for uneasy slumber upon beds of
spikes, weening to wake in the twenty-second heaven. All which romantic
variety of fortune was the work of a diminutive insect that crawled or
clung heedless of the purple it was weaving into the many-coloured web of
human life.

II

Some thirty years after the departure of the Persian embassy to Aurelian,
two travellers met at the bottom of a dell in trans-Gangetic India, having
descended the hill-brow by opposite paths. It was early morning; the sun
had not yet surmounted the timbered and tangled sides of the little valley,
so that the bottom still lay steeped in shadow, and glittering with large
pearls of limpid dew, while the oval space of sky circumscribed by the
summit glowed with the delicate splendour of the purest sapphire. Songs of
birds resounded through the brake, and the water lilies which veiled the
rivulet trickling through the depths of the retreat were unexpanded still.
One of the wayfarers was aged, the othe