“With pleasure,” answered the old man. “It is now nearly forty-five years since it happened,[140] and as I was older then than you are now, you may suppose I remember all quite distinctly. He was indeed a beautiful youth to look at: so mild and sweet, so fair and graceful; and his speech was so gentle, so soft, especially when speaking to the poor. How they all loved him! I followed him everywhere; I stood by as the venerable Pontiff Sixtus was going to death, and Laurentius met him, and so tenderly reproached him, just as a son might a father, for not allowing him to be his companion in the sacrifice of himself, as he had ministered to him in the sacrifice of our Lord’s body and blood.” “Those were splendid times, Diogenes, were they not?” interrupted the youth; “how degenerate we are now! What a different race! Are we not, Quadratus?” The rough soldier smiled at the generous sincerity of his complaint, and bid Diogenes go on. “I saw him too as he distributed the rich plate of the Church to the poor. We have never had any thing so splendid since. There were golden lamps and candlesticks, censors, chalices, and patens,[141] besides an immense quantity of silver melted down, and distributed to the blind, the lame, and the indigent.” “But tell me,” asked Pancratius, “how did he endure his last dreadful torment? It must have been frightful.” “I saw it all,” answered the old fossor, “and it would have been intolerably frightful in another. He had been first placed on the rack, and variously tormented, and he had not uttered a groan; when the judge ordered that horrid bed, or gridiron, to be prepared and heated. To look at his tender flesh blistering and breaking over the fire, and deeply scored with red burning gashes that cut to the bone where the iron bars went across; to see the steam, thick as from a cauldron, rise from his body, and hear the fire hiss beneath him, as he melted away into it; and every now and then to observe the tremulous quivering that crept over the surface of his skin, the living motion which the agony gave to each separate muscle, and the sharp spasmodic twitches which convulsed, and gradually contracted, his limbs; all this, I own, was the most harrowing spectacle I have ever beheld in all my life. But to look into his countenance was to forget all this. His head was raised up from the burning body, and stretched out, as if fixed on the contemplation of some most celestial vision, like that of his fellow-deacon Stephen. His face glowed indeed with the heat below, and the perspiration flowed down it; but the light from the fire shining upwards, and passing through his golden locks, created a glory round his beautiful head and countenance, which made him look as if already in heaven. And every feature, serene and sweet as ever, was so impressed with an eager, longing look, accompanying the upward glancing of his eye, that you would willingly have changed places with him.”