Paulus gazed at the miserable tetrarch, "the quarter of a king," not from the height of his rank as a Roman general, but from the still greater height which God had given him as one of the first, one of the earliest of European gentlemen. He knew not then who John was. But that any fellow-creature in prison, not otherwise to be put to death, should have his head hewn off and placed upon a dish, because a woman had tossed her limbs to and fro in a style which pleased a tetrarch while it disgraced human society, appeared to Paulus to be less than reasonable. What he had said, the tetrarch had said upon oath. A little confusion, a slight murmuring and whispering ensued, but the courtly music soon recommenced. Paulus could not afterward tell how long it was before the most awful scene he had ever witnessed occurred. A menial entered, bearing, on a large dish, a freshly-severed human head, bleeding at the neck. "It was not a jest, then," said Paulus, in a low voice to his next neighbor, a very old man, whose face he remembered, but whose name he had all the evening been trying in vain to recall--"it was not a base jest, dictated by the hideous taste of worse than barbarians!" "Truly," replied the aged man, "these Jews are worse than any barbarians I ever saw, and I have seen most of them." Paulus recognized at these words the geographer Strabo, formerly his companion at the court of Augustus. At a sign from Herod, the menial carrying the dish now approached the daughter of Herodias, and presented to her the bleeding and sacred head. She, in turn, took the dish and offered it to Herodias, who herself bore it out of the room with a kind of snorting laugh. Paulus rose slowly and deliberately from his place near the tetrarch, at whom he steadily looked. "This, then," said he, "is the entertainment to which you have invited a Roman legatus. You are vexed, people say, that Pilate, the Roman governor of this city, could not honor your birthday by his presence in your palace. Pilate's local authority is of course greater than mine, for I have none at all; but his real, permanent rank, and your own real, permanent importance, are contemptible by the side of those which a Roman soldier of such a family as the Æmilian has gained on the field of battle; and it was a high honor to yourself to succeed in bringing me hither. And now, while disgracing your own house, you have insulted your guests. What is the name of the man you have murdered because a woman dances like a goat? What is his name?" The tetrarch, astonished and over-awed, replied with a bewildered look: "What authority to rebuke me, because I took my brother's wife, had John?" "John who?" asked Paulus, who from the outset had been struck by the name. "He who was styled John the Baptist," said the tetrarch. The words of another John rang in Paulus's memory; and he exclaimed: