What were the traveller’s thoughts amidst these shifting scenes of a new act in his life’s drama? did they amuse him? did they delight him? did they elevate him, or did they depress? His eye scarcely noted them. It had run on far beyond them, to the shady porticoes and noisy streets of the [Illustration: Interior of a Roman Theatre.] capital. The dusty garden and the artificial fountain, the marble bath and the painted vault, were more beautiful in his eyes than fresh autumn vineyards, pure streams, purple ocean, and azure sky. He did not, of course, for a moment turn his thoughts towards its foul deeds and impious practices, its luxury, its debauchery, its profaneness, its dishonesties, its calumnies, its treacheries, its uncleannesses. Oh, no! what would he, a Christian, have again to do with these? Sometimes, as his mind became abstracted, it saw, in a dark nook of a hall in the Thermæ, a table, round which moody but eager gamesters were casting their knuckle-bone dice; and he felt a quivering creep over him of an excitement long suppressed; but a pair of mild eyes, like Polycarp’s, loomed on him from behind the table, and aroused him. Then he caught himself, in fancy, seated at a maple board, with a ruby gem of Falernian wine, set in the rim of a golden goblet, and discourse, ungirded by inebriety, going round with the cup; when the reproving countenance of Chromatius would seem placed opposite, repelling with a scowl the approach of either. [Illustration: Hall in the Baths of Caracalla.] He was, in fact, returning only to the innocent enjoyments of the imperial city, to its walks, its music, its paintings, its magnificence, its beauty. He forgot that all these were but the accessories to a living and panting mass of human beings, whose passions they enkindled, whose evil desires they inflamed, whose ambition they fanned, whose resolutions they melted, and whose minds they enervated. Poor youth! he thought he could walk through that fire and not be scorched! Poor moth! he imagined he could fly through that flame, and have his wings unscathed! It was in one of his abstracted moods that he journeyed through a narrow overhung defile, when suddenly he found himself at its opening, with an inlet of the sea before him, and in it one solitary and motionless skiff. The sight at once brought to his memory a story of his childhood, true or false, it mattered not; but he almost fancied its scene was before him.