“I cannot speak philosophical sentences,” answered the servant, “but I mean that inward living consciousness within me, which makes me feel to have an existence with, and among, better things than surround me, which shrinks sensitively from destruction, and instinctively from what is allied to it, as disease is to death. And therefore it abhors all flattery, and it detests a lie. While I possess that unseen gift, and die it cannot, either is impossible to me.” The other two could understand but little of all this; so they stood in stupid amazement at the presumption of their companion. Fabiola too was startled; but her pride soon rose again, and she spoke with visible impatience. “Where did you learn all this folly? Who has taught you to prate in this manner? For my part, I have studied for many years, and have come to the conclusion, that all ideas of spiritual existences are the dreams of poets, or sophists; and as such I despise them. Do you, an ignorant, uneducated slave, pretend to know better than your mistress? Or do you really fancy, that when, after death, your corpse will be thrown on the heap of slaves who have drunk themselves, or have been scourged, to death, to be burnt in one ignominious pile, and when the mingled ashes have been buried in a common pit, _you_ will survive as a conscious being, and have still a life of joy and freedom to be lived?” “‘_Non omnis moriar_,’[18] as one of your poets says,” replied [Illustration: “Fabiola grasped the style in her right hand, and made an almost blind thrust at the unflinching handmaid.”] modestly, but with a fervent look that astonished her mistress, the foreign slave; “yes, I hope, nay, I _intend_ to survive all this. And more yet; I believe, and know, that out of that charnel-pit which you have so vividly described, there is a hand that will pick out each charred fragment of my frame. And there is a power that will call to reckoning the four winds of heaven, and make each give back every grain of my dust that it has scattered; and I shall be built up once more in this my body, not as yours, or any one’s, bondwoman, but free, and joyful, and glorious, loving for ever, and beloved. This certain hope is laid up in my bosom.”[19] “What wild visions of an eastern fancy are these, unfitting you for every duty? You must be cured of them. In what school did you learn all this nonsense? I never read of it in any Greek or Latin author.” “In one belonging to my own land; a school in which there is no distinction known, or admitted, between Greek or barbarian, freeman or slave.”