but their father was even taller than they, and of unusual breadth of
shoulder.

While the young men were speaking, he stroked his short grey beard and
looked down at the ground in sombre gravity, as it might have seemed
to the careless observer; but any one who looked closer might quickly
perceive that not seldom a pleased smile, though not less often a
somewhat bitter one, played upon the lips of the prudent and judicious
man. He was one of those who can play with their children like a young
mother, take the sorrows of another as much to heart as if they were
their own, and yet who look so gloomy, and allow themselves to make such
sharp speeches, that only those who are on terms of perfect confidence
with them, cease to misunderstand them and fear them. There was
something fretting the soul of this man, who nevertheless possessed all
that could contribute to human happiness. His was a thankful nature,
and yet he was conscious that he might have been destined to something
greater than fate had permitted him to achieve or to be. He had remained
a stone-cutter, but his sons had both completed their education in good
schools in Alexandria. The elder, Antonius, who already had a house of
his own and a wife and children, was an architect and artist-mechanic;
the younger, Polykarp, was a gifted young sculptor. The noble church
of the oasis-city had been built under the direction of the elder;
Polykarp, who had only come home a month since, was preparing to
establish and carry on works of great extent in his father's quarries,
for he had received a commission to decorate the new court of
the Sebasteion or Caesareum, as it was called--a grand pile in
Alexandria--with twenty granite lions. More than thirty artists had
competed with him for this work, but the prize was unanimously adjudged
to his models by qualified judges. The architect whose function it was
to construct the colonnades and pavement of the court was his friend,
and had agreed to procure the blocks of granite, the flags and the
columns which he required from Petrus' quarries, and not, as had
formerly been the custom, from those of Syene by the first Cataract.

Antonius and Polykarp were now standing with their father before a large
table, explaining to him a plan which they had worked out together and
traced on the thin wax surface of a wooden tablet. The young architect's
proposal was to bridge over a deep but narrow gorge, which the beasts of
burden were obl