Braziers were being slowly lighted. But notwithstanding the approach of night, traffic and discussion gave no sign of ceasing in the network of alleys. From a neighbouring forge piercing blows of the hammer resounded on bars of iron, and flames shot up the sooty draught-hole. Hard by, slaves of a bakery, naked, covered from head to foot in flour-dust, and with eyelids inflamed by heat, were putting loaves into an oven. A shoemaker sat in his open-air stall, amid an insupportable smell of cobbler's glue and leather, stitching shoes by the light of a smoky lamp. He was squatting on his heels, and chanting desert songs at the top of his voice. Two old hags like witches, with hair streaming in the wind, were slowly passing across the little square in front of a row of hovels. They were yelling at each other, wrangling and threatening each other with fists and stones. The subject of dispute was the ownership of a cord on which to dry linen. A huckster, from a distant village, was hurrying along to be in time for the morning market. He was mounted on an old mare, flanked with wicker paniers, each heaped with rotting fish; the fetid smell of his load made passers-by edge off to a distance. A loutish urchin, with red hair and skin, was solacing his soul by beating on a great pan, while other children, a sickly multitude coming into the world and leaving it by hundreds daily, marched amidst this scene of poverty, grunting like pigs, round the pools of the quay. The water was full of orange-peel and egg-shells. In yet more villainous passages, inhabited by thieves, the smell of sour wine came from wine-shops, and sailors from every beach of the world marched along arm in arm, shouting drunken songs. Surrounding all that noise, that filth and spilth of human misery, there murmured, sighed, and grumbled, the infinite, distant, and invisible sea. Directly over against the subterranean kitchen windows of a Phoenician dealer, ragged gamblers were playing at knuckle-bones, and gossiping. From the kitchen warm gusts of boiling gravy, game, and spices ascended, greedily snuffed-up, with closed eyes, by the hungry gamesters. A certain Christian, a dyer of purple, dismissed for theft from a rich factory at Tyre, was murmuring, as he hungrily sucked a mallow-leaf thrown away by the cook,-- "And at Antioch, my friends, what's going on there makes one shiver at nights, just to think of it. Why, a few days ago the hungry folk tore in pieces the Prefect Theophilus--and for what reason? Nobody knows! When the thing was done they remembered too late that the poor wretch was a good sort of fellow and a respectable man. I suggested that perhaps the Emperor had pointed him out for punishment." A consumptive old man, a very skilful cardsharper, replied--