s
that of Ulpius never was disclosed. Some declared that the city
magistrate was still at heart a Pagan, and that he consequently shrunk
from authorising the death of a man who had once been the most
illustrious among the professors of the ancient creed. Others reported
that Ulpius had secured the leniency of his judges by acquainting them
with the position of one of those secret repositories of enormous
treasure supposed to exist beneath the foundations of the dismantled
Temple of Serapis. But the truth of either of these rumours could
never be satisfactorily proved. Nothing more was accurately discovered
than that Ulpius was removed from Alexandria to the place of earthly
torment set apart for him by the zealous authorities, at the dead of
night; and that the sentry at the gate through which he departed heard
him mutter to himself, as he was hurried onward, that his divinations
had prepared him for defeat, but that the great day of Pagan
restoration would yet arrive.

In the year 407, twelve years after the events above narrated, Ulpius
entered the city of Rome.

He had not advanced far, before the gaiety and confusion in the streets
appeared completely to bewilder him. He hastened to the nearest public
garden that he could perceive, and avoiding the frequented paths, flung
himself down, apparently fainting with exhaustion, at the foot of a
tree.

For some time he lay on the shady resting-place which he had chosen,
gasping painfully for breath, his frame ever and anon shaken to its
centre by sudden spasms, and his lips quivering with an agitation which
he vainly endeavoured to suppress. So changed was his aspect, that the
guards who had removed him from Alexandria, wretched as was his
appearance even then, would have found it impossible to recognise him
now as the same man whom they had formerly abandoned to slavery in the
mines of Spain. The effluvia exhaled from the copper ore in which he
had been buried for twelve years had not only withered the flesh upon
his bones, but had imparted to its surface a livid hue, almost
death-like in its dulness. His limbs, wasted by age and distorted by
suffering, bent and trembled beneath him; and his form, once so
majestic in its noble proportions, was now so crooked and misshapen,
that whoever beheld him could only have imagined that he must have been
deformed from his birth. Of the former man no characteristic remained
but the expression of the stern, mournful eye