to steal his master’s gold, was not only a heinous but a capital offence. He did not know but what Philemon, good and kind as he was, might still deem it right to uphold the laws of the State, and to hand him over to the magistrates. And then he shuddered to think of what awaited him: what blows, what brandings, what wearing of the furca, or thrusting into the stocks, or being made to work in the mines or the galleys, or among the chained wretches of some public slave-prison. The soft nature of the Eastern shrank from such horrors, and almost more from the intolerable sense of shame which would overwhelm him when he stood for the first time a convict-fugitive in his master’s house. His ill-got money was soon ill-gone. A little of it was lost in gambling; some he had to squander on worthless companions, who tried to insinuate themselves into his favour, or to terrify him with their suspicions; the rest was stolen one night in the low lodging which he had been obliged to seek. Penniless, and sick at heart, he hurried down to the great quay of the city, and offered to work his passage to Italy in a galley. Landed in Italy he had begged his way to Rome, and in Rome he had sunk to the wretchedness in which we first saw him. No career seemed open to him but a career of vice; no possibility offered of earning his daily bread but by criminal courses. He sank back horrified from the rascality which he had witnessed on every side, among those who, being past feeling, and having their consciences seared as with a hot iron, wrought all uncleanness with greediness. He grew more and more emaciated, more and more wretched, sleeping under arches or porticoes, and depending for his scant supply of polenta on the chance of a farthing flung to him now and then in scornful alms. The accident which threw him in the path of Pudens came only just in time to save him from ruin and despair. Nereus, the freedman of Pudens, was not unwilling to get for nothing an active youth who might turn out to be a useful slave; and in that household he once more found kindness and happiness. It is true that Pudens was not yet an open Christian, but several of his slaves were, as Onesimus soon discovered; and he had learnt by experience that, among Christian men and women, he was safe from a thousand miseries and a thousand temptations. The busy thronging, rushing life of Rome delighted his quick intelligence, and all the more from the contrast it presented to the silent streets of Colossæ, and the narrow valley of its strange white stream.