ers who walk to
music, in the language of the noisy market-people; wherever you go, you
are accosted, confronted, publicly, shamelessly, now as if a precept of
religion, now as if a homage to nature, by all which, as a Christian, you
shrink from and abjure.

It is no accident of the season or of the day; it is the continuous
tradition of some thousands of years; it is the very orthodoxy of the
myriads who have lived and died there. There was a region once, in an
early age, lying upon the Eastern Sea, which is said at length to have
vomited out its inhabitants for their frightful iniquity. They, thus cast
forth, took ship, and passed over to the southern coast; and then,
gradually settling and spreading into the interior, they peopled the woody
plains and fertile slopes of Africa, and filled it with their cities.
Sicca is one of these set up in sin; and at the time of which we write
that sin was basking under the sun, and rioting and extending itself to
its amplest dimensions, like some glittering serpent or spotted pard of
the neighbourhood, without interposition from heaven or earth in
correction of so awful a degradation. In such scenes of unspeakable
pollution, our Christian forefathers perforce lived; through such a scene,
though not taking part in it, Agellius, blessed with a country home, is
unnecessarily passing.

He has reached the house, or rather the floor, to which he has been making
his way. It is at the back of the city, where the rock is steep; and it
looks out upon the plain and the mountain range to the north. Its inmates,
Aristo and Callista, are engaged in their ordinary work of moulding or
carving, painting or gilding the various articles which the temples or the
private shrines of the established religion required. Aristo has received
from Jucundus the overtures which Agellius had commissioned him to make,
and finds, as he anticipated, that they are no great news to his sister.
She perfectly understands what is going on, but does not care to speak
much upon it, till Agellius makes his appearance. As they sit at work,
Aristo speaks:--

"Agellius will make his appearance here this morning. I say, Callista,
what can he be coming for?"

"Why, if your news be true, that the Christians are coming into trouble,
of course he means to purchase, as a blessing on him, some of these bits
of gods."

"You are sharp enough, my little sister," answered Aristo, "to know
perfectly well who is the goddess he is d