Lean Gaius yesterday breathed his very last breath, and left nothing at all for burial, but having passed down into Hades just as he was in life, flutters there the thinnest of the anatomies under earth; and his kinsfolk lifted an empty bier on their shoulders, inscribing above it, "This is Gaius' funeral." XXII A LABOUR OF HERCULES LUCILIUS Tiny Macron was found asleep one summer day by a mouse, who pulled him by his tiny foot into its hole; but in the hole he strangled the mouse with his naked hands and cried, "Father Zeus, thou hast a second Heracles." XXIII EROTION LUCILIUS Small Erotion while playing was carried aloft by a gnat, and cried, "What can I do, Father Zeus, if thou dost claim me?" XXIV ARTEMIDORA LUCILIUS Fanning thin Artemidora in her sleep, Demetrius blew her clean out of the house. XXV THE ATOMIC THEORY LUCILIUS Epicurus wrote that the whole universe consisted of atoms, thinking, Alcimus, that the atom was the least of things. But if Diophantus had lived then, he would have written, "consisted of Diophantus," who is much more minute than even the atoms, or would have written that all other things indeed consist of atoms, but the atoms themselves of him. XXVI CHAEREMON LUCILIUS Borne up by a slight breeze, Chaeremon floated through the clear air, far lighter than chaff, and probably would have gone spinning off through ether, but that he caught his feet in a spider's web, and dangled there on his back; there he hung five nights and days, and on the sixth came down by a strand of the web. XXVII GOD AND THE DOCTOR NICARCHUS Marcus the doctor called yesterday on the marble Zeus; though marble, and though Zeus, his funeral is to-day. XXVIII THE PHYSICIAN AND THE ASTROLOGER NICARCHUS Diophantus the asrologer said that Hermogenes the physician had only nine months to live; and he laughing replied, "what Cronus may do in nine months, do you consider; but I can make short work with you." He spoke, and reaching out, just touched him, and Diophantus, while forbidding another to hope, gasped out his own life. XXIX A DEADLY DREAM LUCILIUS Diophantus, having seen Hermogenes the physician in sleep, never awoke again, though he wore an amulet.