"This forty years I have never washed, that I might not see my nakedness, nor fall into temptation. And yet coming into cities, straight one perceives these accursed gods without a rag upon them. How long must we endure these devilish temptations! At the hearth, in the street, on the roof, in the baths, these idols everywhere above one's head?... Faugh! Faugh! Faugh! How can I spit enough disgust on things like these?" The old man spurned the prostrate woman's form with his sandal in energetic horror; stamped on the bare breast as if it were alive, and kept scoring it with the sharp nails of his sandals, stuttering with rage-- "Take that, and that--and that, O foul immodesty!" The lips of the goddess lay with their calm smile under the soles of his feet. The crowd began to haul the statue upright in order to tilt it into the bonfire. Drunken garlic-smelling apprentices spat in the metal face. An enormous blaze, built of the massed wreckage of market-booths, quickly arose. The statue was dropped into the flames to be melted into silver bullion. "There are five talents' worth! think--thirty thousand pieces of silver! We'll send half to the Emperor to pay the army, and take the other half for famished folk here. Cybele will bring solace to mankind at last, anyhow! Thirty thousand pieces of silver for the soldiers and the poor!" "Bring fuel, more wood!" The flame mounted still more fiercely; the mob burst into laughter. "We'll see whether the devil flies out of her! There's a demon in every idol, you know, and two or three inside goddesses!" "When she begins to melt it'll get too hot for the devil, and he'll come wriggling out of her mouth like a red serpent!" "No! you must make the sign of the cross beforehand. If you don't, he can glide into the earth. Last year, when we pulled down the temple of Aphrodite, someone sprinkled her with holy water and--can you believe it?--a whole flight of devilets scampered away from underneath the statue--I saw them myself--green and black and hairy all over! And when the head was broken open the big devil came out of her neck, with great horns and a tail as bald as a mangy dog!" At this moment Iamblicus, half dead with terror, seized Julian by the hand and dragged him away-- "Look! Do you see those two men? They are spies sent by Constantius. Your brother Gallus has been taken under escort to Constantinople. Be careful; this very day there will be a report sent in as to how you bear yourself." "But what is there to be done, Master? I am well accustomed to it; for years they have kept spies about me." "For years! Why have you said nothing of it to me?" The hand of Iamblicus shook within that of Julian. "Why are those two whispering together? Look at them--they must be pagans.... Now then old man, hurry up, bring wood!" cried out a ragged rascal in a triumphant tone. Iamblicus whispered into Julian's ear--