“I have just heard a story which reads like a parable,” Fabricius replied. “The ancient treasures of your Jerusalem and of our Rome have fallen alike into the hands of the Vandals; but their fate has been quite opposite. Yours have been borne safely to another shore; but ours lie lost for ever in the depths of the sea.” Ethne was standing near, and she knelt down and laid her gentle touch on the hand of Fabricius. “Father,” she said, “shall _anything_ really good perish and be lost for ever in the depths of any sea? Does not your old Rome live on in her great laws, and in our own Leo? Are not all the real treasures carried on and translated into their true use and meaning in the Kingdom of our Christ?” And Damaris, with little Paul in her arms, added— “Surely all the true treasures of all the temples shall be saved, to be understood and used better by the babes who shall succeed us _here_; and,” she concluded in a lower voice, “to be carried safely across the sea to the other shore, whither we are going, to the land of the living, to the City which hath the foundations.” The families of the Anician villa and the freehold farm on the mountains, the ancient inheritance of its possessors, dating back with a pedigree beyond the beginnings of Rome, were much linked together. Through Miriam and Eleazar, Rachel and her children, the first Testament of God came to Ethne and her children, as a great national literature and history. Abraham in his tents with his flocks and herds; David, shepherd, hero, and king; Job, the great chieftain, who saw the dark side of the world and ventured to bewail it to God, and was not rejected by Him, but accepted and honoured; Moses, loving his rebellious people more than himself, and leading them through sea and desert; Daniel in the lions’ den; the Three Children who chose the fire rather than falsehood, and walked through the fire unharmed beside One like the Son of God;—all these were living persons of a living story to Ethne’s children. Dear, moreover, to Ethne with an intimate affection, besides these earthly friends, were the heavenly friends of the toiling and the suffering—the angel who came to the forsaken slave-woman, and called her by name, and led her back to her dying child, that God might open her eyes to see the “well,” and the child might live; the angel who came to the despairing prophet, and brought him the little cake, when less sympathetic mortals might have inflicted on him a sermon on despondency. To her the voices of the old Hebrew prophets also, with the magnificent daring of their denunciations of oppression and wrong, came as fresh and inspiring as if she had heard them in the palaces on the Palatine but yesterday, or anywhere in the streets of Orleans and Troyes.