Next morning Onesimus, as he accompanied the priests and their ass, saw the criminal hanging naked on his cross. He was a man of fine proportions and in the prime of life, and his strength was slowly ebbing away in horrible and feverish torture. The Galli as they passed spat on him, but Onesimus stayed behind. The wretch was not only living, though in extreme agony, but would probably continue to live for two days more, unless the wolves got at him or the magistrates thought fit to send their lictors to end his life by two blows of a ponderous mallet in order to save the trouble of having the cross watched. It was no base curiosity which made the Phrygian linger by that spectacle of shame and anguish. It was rather an awful pity--a heart-rending remembrance. Sunk, fallen, ruined, guilty as he himself was, he yet could not see without horror this awful reminder of One who had perished, since his own birth, in Palestine, and in whom he had not yet ceased to believe as a Saviour, though he had fallen away from his heavenly calling. The man turned towards him his tortured face and glazing eyes. ‘By all the infernal gods,’ he said, ‘give me something to quench my thirst.’ ‘There are no infernal gods,’ Onesimus said, ‘but I will give thee;’ and taking out from the bag which he carried a bottle of the common _posca_--sour wine which was the ordinary drink of the peasantry--he poured a full draught into an earthenware cup and held it to the sufferer’s lips. This he could easily do, for the cross (as always) was raised but a little from the ground. ‘God help thee!’ he said, as he turned away. ‘He helped the robber on Golgotha,’ he murmured to himself; ‘who knows whether he may not find even this poor wretch in his hour of agony--yea, and even me?’ ‘My blessing would be a curse,’ moaned the crucified slave, ‘or I would say, “The gods bless _thee_ who canst pity such as I am.”’ Onesimus left him there in the pathos and tragedy of his awful helplessness. The youth’s soul was appalled by the sense of the mystery of human life and human agony, and it came home to him, as it had never done before, that the solution of the fearful riddle of human wickedness could only lie, if anywhere, in the life and death of Him in whom in some sense he believed, but whose peace he did not know.