be ashamed of Cupid's
livery, my girls--saffron shawl and all! Come, and let us see whether
saucy Aphrodite is not a match after all for Pallas Athene and her owl!'

And she darted out of the cloister.

The three younger men burst into a roar of laughter, while Wulf looked
with grim approval.

'So you want to go and hear the philosopher, prince?' said Smid.

'Wheresoever a holy and a wise woman speaks, a warrior need not be
ashamed of listening. Did not Alaric bid us spare the nuns in Rome,
comrade? And though I am no Christian as he was, I thought it no shame
for Odin's man to take their blessing; nor will I to take this one's,
Smid, son of Troll.'

CHAPTER XIII: THE BOTTOM OF THE ABYSS

'Here am I, at last!' said Raphael Aben-Ezra to himself. 'Fairly and
safely landed at the very bottom of the bottomless; disporting myself on
the firm floor of the primeval nothing, and finding my new element, like
boys when they begin to swim, not so impracticable after all. No man,
angel, or demon, can this day cast it in my teeth that I am weak enough
to believe or disbelieve any phenomenon or theory in or concerning
heaven or earth; or even that any such heaven, earth, phenomena,
or theories exist--or otherwise.... I trust that is a sufficiently
exhaustive statement of my opinions? .... I am certainly not dogmatic
enough to deny--or to assert either--that there are sensations.... far
too numerous for comfort .... but as for proceeding any further, by
induction, deduction, analysis, or synthesis, I utterly decline
the office of Arachne, and will spin no more cobwebs out of my
own inside--if I have any. Sensations? What are they, but parts of
oneself--if one has a self! What put this child's fancy into one's head,
that there is anything outside of one which produces them? You have
exactly similar feelings in your dreams, and you know that there is no
reality corresponding to them--No, you don't! How dare you be dogmatic
enough to affirm that? Why should not your dreams be as real as your
waking thoughts? Why should not your dreams be the reality, and your
waking thoughts the dream? What matter which?

'What matter indeed? Here have I been staring for years--unless that,
too, is a dream, which it very probably is--at every mountebank "ism"
which ever tumbled and capered on the philosophic tight-rope; and they
are every one of them dead dolls, wooden, worked with wires, which are
_petitiones principii_.... Each philosophe