rences, which the
philosopher--

The rest of the sentence disappeared with the speaker, as a sudden
opening of the mob let him drop, and buried him under innumerable legs.

Philammon, furious at the notion of persecution, maddened by the cries
around him, found himself bursting fiercely through the crowd, till he
reached the front ranks, where tall gates of open ironwork barred all
farther progress, but left a full view of the tragedy which was enacting
within, where the poor innocent wretch, suspended from a gibbet, writhed
and shrieked at every stroke of the hide whips of his tormentors.

In vain Philammon and the monks around him knocked and beat at
the gates; they were only answered by laughter and taunts from the
apparitors within, curses on the turbulent mob of Alexandria, with its
patriarch, clergy, saints, and churches, and promises to each and all
outside, that their turn would come next; while the piteous screams grew
fainter and more faint, and at last, with a convulsive shudder, motion
and suffering ceased for ever in the poor mangled body.

'They have killed him! Martyred him! Back to the archbishop! To the
patriarch's house: he will avenge us!' And as the horrible news, and
the watchword which followed it, passed outwards through the crowd, they
wheeled round as one man, and poured through street after street towards
Cyril's house; while Philammon, beside himself with horror, rage, and
pity, hurried onward with them.

A tumultuous hour, or more, was passed in the street before he could
gain entrance; and then he was swept, along with the mob in which he had
been fast wedged, through a dark low passage, and landed breathless in
a quadrangle of mean and new buildings, overhung by the four hundred
stately columns of the ruined Serapeium. The grass was already
growing on the ruined capitals and architraves.... Little did even its
destroyers dream then, that the day would come when one only of that
four hundred would be left, as 'Pompey's Pillar,' to show what the men
of old could think and do.

Philammon at last escaped from the crowd, and putting the letter which
he had carried in his bosom into the hands of one of the priests who
was mixing with the mob, was beckoned by him into a corridor, and up a
flight of stairs, and into a large, low, mean room, and there, by virtue
of the world-wide freemasonry which Christianity had, for the first
time on earth, established, found himself in five minutes awaitin