“Sire, your divinity has often reproached me with having made, by my discoveries, but a poor return for your gracious countenance and liberal subsidies. But now I have found out the foulest of plots, and the basest of ingratitudes, in immediate contact with your divine person.” “What dost thou mean, booby?” asked impatiently the tyrant. “Speak at once, or I’ll have the words pulled out of thy throat by an iron hook.” Fulvius rose, and directing his hand, in accompaniment to his words, said with a bitter blandness of tone: “Sebastian is a Christian.” The emperor started from his throne in fury. “Thou liest, villain! Thou shalt prove thy words, or thou shalt die such a piecemeal death, as no Christian dog ever endured.” “I have sufficient proof recorded here,” he replied, producing a parchment, and offering it, kneeling. The emperor was about to make an angry answer, when, to his utter amazement, Sebastian, with unruffled looks and noble mien, stood before him, and in the calmest accents said: “My liege, I spare you all trouble of proof. I _am_ a Christian, and I glory in the name.” As Maximian, a rude though clever soldier, without education, could hardly when calm express himself in decent Latin, when he was in a passion his language was composed of broken sentences, mingled with every vulgar and coarse epithet. In this state he was now; and he poured out on Sebastian a torrent of abuse, in which he reproached him with every crime, and called him by every opprobrious name, within his well-stocked repertory of vituperation. The two crimes, however, on which he rung his loudest changes were, ingratitude and treachery. He had nursed, he said, a viper in his bosom, a scorpion, an evil demon; and he only wondered he was still alive. The Christian officer stood the volley, as intrepidly as ever he had borne the enemy’s assault, on the field of battle. “Listen to me, my royal master,” he replied, “perhaps for the last time. I have said I am a Christian; and in this you have had the best pledge of your security.” “How do you mean, ungrateful man?” “Thus, noble emperor: that if you want a body-guard around you of men who will spill their last drop of life’s blood for you, go to the prison and take the Christians from the stocks on the floor, and from the fetter-rings on the walls; send to the courts and bear away the mutilated confessors from the rack and the gridiron; issue orders to the amphitheatres, and snatch the mangled half that lives from the jaws of tigers; restore them to such shape as yet they are capable of, put weapons into their hands, and place them around you; and in this maimed and ill-favored host there will be more fidelity, more loyalty, more daring for you, than in all your Dacian and Pannonian legions. You have taken half their blood from them, and they will give you willingly the other half.”