'You must be a good Jew, sir, before you can be a good Christian.'

'Possibly. I intend to be neither--nor a good Pagan either. My dear sir,
let us drop the subject. It is beyond me. If I can be as good a brute
animal as my dog there--it being first demonstrated that it is good to
be good--I shall be very well content.'

The officer looked down on with a stately, loving sorrow. Raphael caught
his eye, and felt that he was in the presence of no common man.

'I must take care what I say here, I suspect, or I shall be entangled
shortly in a regular Socratic dialogue.... And now, sir, may I return
your question, and ask who and what are you? I really have no intention
of giving you up to any Caesar, Antiochus, Tiglath-Pileser, or other
flea-devouring flea.... They will fatten well enough without your blood.
So I only ask as a student of the great nothing-in-general, which men
call the universe.'

'I was prefect of a legion this morning. What I am now, you know as well
as I.'

'Just what I do not. I am in deep wonder at seeing your hilarity, when,
by all flea-analogies, you ought to be either be howling your fate like
Achilles on the shores of Styx, or pretending to grin and bear it, as
I was taught to do when I played at Stoicism. You are not of that sect
certainly, for you confessed yourself a fool just now.'

'And it would be long, would it not, before you made one of them do as
much? Well, be it so. A fool I am; yet, if God helps us as far as Ostia,
why should I not be cheerful?'

'Why should you?'

'What better thing can happen to a fool, than that God should teach that
he is one, when he fancied himself the wisest of the wise? Listen to
me, sir. Four mouths ago I was blessed with health, honour, lands,
friends--all for which the heart of man could wish. And if, for an
insane ambition, I have chosen to risk all those, against the solemn
warnings of the truest friend, and the wisest saint who treads this
earth of God's--should I not rejoice to have it proved to me, even by
such a lesson as this, that the friend who never deceived me before was
right in this case too; and that the God who has checked and turned me
for forty years of wild toil and warfare, whenever I dared to do what
was right in the sight of my own eyes, has not forgotten me yet, or
given up the thankless task of my education?'

'And who, pray, is this peerless friend?'

'Augustine of Hippo.'

'Humph! It had been better for the world in gener