The halt, the maimed, the sick, and the blind, expectant of miracle, thronged near the tomb. Julian understood why they stationed themselves here. One of the monks used to hold a pair of balances; the pilgrims--some of them come from hamlets many leagues away--weighed with scrupulous care pieces of linen, woollen stuff, or silk; and having laid them on the tomb of St. Mamas, would fall to praying all night. At daylight the stuff was weighed over again, and the weight compared with the weight on the previous day. If the texture proved heavier, it was declared that the prayer had been answered, that the divine mercy, like dew, had soaked into the stuff and rendered it capable of producing all manner of marvellous cures. But frequently the prayer was in vain. The stuff weighed just what it did before; and pilgrims would pass whole days, weeks, even months, waiting at the sepulchre. Among the latter there was an old woman named Theodula. Some called her demented; others counted her a saint. For years she had not quitted the tomb of St. Mamas. The daughter for whose restoration she had come to pray had now been a long while dead. But Theodula continued kneeling ceaselessly before her faded and ravelled fragment of cloth. From the outer court three doors led into the basilica--one for women, one for men, and the third, in the centre, for monks and the lower clergy. With Eutropius and Gallus, Julian went in through this last door, being _anagnost_ or reader of the lessons for the day. Clothed in a long black robe with white sleeves, his hair anointed, and bound back by a fillet that it might not fall into his eyes while reading aloud, Julian passed through the midst of the faithful, his eyes fixed humbly on the ground. His pale face assumed almost involuntarily the inevitable and hypocritical expression of submissiveness. He ascended the high rood-loft. The frescoes of the wall to the right depicted the martyrdom of St. Euthymus, in which one executioner seized the sufferer's head, while another, wrenching open his mouth with pincers, brought the cup of molten lead to his lips. In another scene the executioner with an instrument of torture was flaying the childish and bleeding limbs of St. Euthymus, hanging from a tree by his hands. Beneath these frescoes ran the inscription, "With the blood of the martyrs, O Lord, Thy church is arrayed as in purple and fine linen."