elate my stories by way of practice. I will
address them to the walls, or to the air, or to the defunct gods and
goddesses of antiquity, should they happen at this moment to be
hovering over the city in a rage, as some of the unconverted would have
us believe; or to our neighbours the Goths, if they are seized with a
sudden desire to quite their encampments, and obtain a near view of the
fortifications that they are so discreetly unwilling to assault. Or,
these materials for a fit and decent auditory failing me, I will tell
my stories to the most attentive of all listeners--myself.'

And the sentinel, without further delay, opened his budget of
anecdotes, with the easy fluency of of a man who possessed a
well-placed confidence in the perfection of his capacities for
narration. Determined that his saturnine colleague should hear him,
though he would not give him his attention, he talked in a raised
voice, pacing briskly backwards and forwards over the space of his
allotted limits, and laughing with ludicrous regularity and complacency
at every jest that he happened to make in the course of his
ill-rewarded narrative. He little thought, as he continued to proceed
in his tale that its commencement had been welcomed by an unseen
hearer, with emotions widely different from those which had dictated
the observations of the unfriendly companion of his watch.

True to his determination, Ulpius, with part of the wages which he had
hoarded in Numerian's service, had procured a small lantern from a shop
in one of the distant quarters of Rome; and veiling its light in a
piece of coarse, thick cloth, had proceeded by the solitary pathway to
his second night's labour at the wall. He arrived at the breach, at
the commencement of the dialogue above related, and heard with delight
the sentinel's noisy resolution to amuse his companion in spite of
himself. The louder and the longer the man talked, the less probable
was the chance that the Pagan's labours in the interior of the wall
would be suspected or overheard.

Softly clearing away the brushwood at the entrance of the hole that he
had made the night before, Ulpius crept in as far as he had penetrated
on that occasion; and then, with mingled emotions of expectation and
apprehension which affected him so powerfully, that he was for the
moment hardly master of his actions, he slowly and cautiously uncovered
his light.

His first glance was intuitively directed to the cavity tha