oo prosperous
nowadays; and fine ladies walk about with Magdalens embroidered on their
silks, and gospels hanging round their necks. When I was young they died
for that with which they now bedizen themselves.'

'But I was speaking of the parabolani.'

'Ah, there are a great many among them who have not much business where
they are. Don't say I said so. But many a rich man puts his name on the
list of the guild just to get his exemption from taxes, and leaves the
work to poor men like you. Rotten, rotten! my son, and you will find
it out. The preachers, now--people used to say--I know Abbot Isidore
did--that I had as good a gift for expounding as any man in Pelusium;
but since I came here, eleven years since, if you will believe it, I
have never been asked to preach in my own parish church.'

'You surely jest!'

'True, as I am a christened man. I know why--I know why: they are afraid
of Isidore's men here.... Perhaps they may have caught the holy man's
trick of plain speaking--and ears are dainty in Alexandria. And there
are some in these parts, too, that have never forgiven him the part he
took about those three villains, Marc, Zosimus, and Martinian, and a
certain letter that came of it; or another letter either, which we
know of, about taking alms for the church from the gains of robbers and
usurers. "Cyril never forgets." So he says to every one who does him a
good turn.... And so he does to every one who he fancies has done him
a bad one. So here am I slaving away, a subordinate priest, while such
fellows as Peter the Reader look down on me as their slave. But
it's always so. There never was a bishop yet, except the blessed
Augustine--would to Heaven I had taken my abbot's advice, and gone to
him at Hippo!--who had not his flatterers and his tale-bearers, and
generally the archdeacon at the head of them, ready to step into the
bishop's place when he dies, over the heads of hard-working parish
priests. But that is the way of the world. The sleekest and the oiliest,
and the noisiest; the man who can bring in most money to the charities,
never mind whence or how; the man who will take most of the bishop's
work off his hands, and agree with him in everything he wants, and save
him, by spying and eavesdropping, the trouble of using his own eyes;
that is the man to succeed in Alexandria, or Constantinople, or Rome
itself. Look now; there are but seven deacons to this great city, and
all its priests; and they and the a