spoke with perfect lucidity, received
reports, and gave orders. It was with peculiar terror that his soul
avoided every recollection of his mother, of Theokritus, and all those
whose opinion he had formerly valued and whose judgment was not
indifferent to him.

In constant terror of the dagger of an avenger--a dread which, with many
other peculiarities, the leech could hardly ascribe to the diseased
phenomena of his mental state--he only showed himself to his soldiers,
and he might often be seen making a meal off a pottage he himself had
cooked to escape the poison which had been fatal to his lion. He was
never for an instant free from the horrible sense of being hated,
shunned, and persecuted by the whole world.

Sometimes he would remember that once a fair girl had prayed for him; but
when he tried to recall her features he could only see the charred arm
with the golden snake held up before him as he had pictured it that night
after the most hideous of his massacres; and every time, at the sight of
it, that word came back to him which still tortured his soul above all
else--"The deed." But his attendants, who heard him repeating it day and
night, never knew what he meant by it.

When Zminis met his end by the wild beasts in the arena, it was before
half-empty seats, though several legions had been ordered into the
amphitheatre to fill them. The larger number of the citizens were slain,
and the remainder were in mourning for relatives more or less near; and
they also kept away from the scene to avoid the hated despot.

Macrinus now governed the empire almost as a sovereign, for Caesar,
formerly a laborious and autocratic ruler, shrank from all business. Even
before they left Alexandria the plebeian prefect could see that
Serapion's prophecy was fulfilling itself. He remained in close intimacy
with the soothsayer; but only once more, and just before Caesar's
departure, could the magian be induced to raise the spirits of the dead,
for his clever accomplice, Castor, had fallen a victim in the massacre
because, prompted by the high price set on Alexander's head, and his own
fierce hatred of the young painter, he would go out to discover where he
and his sister had concealed themselves.

When at last the unhappy monarch quitted Alexandria one rainy morning,
followed by the curses of innumerable mourners--fathers, mothers, widows,
and orphans--as well as of ruined artisans and craftsmen, the ill-used
city, once so proud