The Rev. C. W. King, in his ‘Handbook of Engraved Gems,’ gives the following fish-and-ring story. Pietrus Damianus, a very unlikely personage to have ever read of Polycrates, relates in his Fifth Epistle a story worth translating literally, as a specimen of the style of thought of his age:--‘This Arnulphus was the father of King Pepin and grandfather of Charlemagne, and when, inflamed with the fervour of the Holy Ghost he sacrificed the love of wife and children, and exchanged the glory and pomps of this world for the glorious poverty of Christ, it chanced, as he was hastening into the wilderness, that in his way he had to cross a river, which is called the Moselle; but when he reached the middle of the bridge, thrown over it where the river’s stream ran deepest, he tossed in there his own ring with this protestation, “When I shall receive back,” said he, “this ring from the foaming waves of this river, then will I trust confidently that I am loosed from the bonds of all my sins.” Thereupon he made for the wilderness, where he lived no little space dead unto himself and the world. Meanwhile, the then Bishop of Metz having died, Divine Providence raised Arnulphus to the charge of that see. Continuing in his new office to abstain from eating flesh, according to the rule observed by him in the wilderness, once upon a time a fish was brought him for a present. The cook, in gutting the same, found in its entrails a ring, and ran full of joy to present it to his master; which ring the blessed Bishop no sooner cast eyes upon than he knew it again for his own, and wondered not so much at the strange mine that had brought forth the metal, as that, by the Divine propitiation, he had obtained the forgiveness of his sins.’