During this time, in compliance with the wishes of Melanius, who seemed unwilling that I should become wholly estranged from the world, I occasionally paid a visit to the neighbouring city, Antinoë, which, as the capital of the Thebaid, is the centre of all the luxury of Upper Egypt. Here,—so changed was my every feeling by the all‐transforming passion that possessed me,—I wandered, unamused and uninterested by either the scenes or the people that surrounded me, and, sighing for that rocky solitude where Alethe breathed, felt _this_ to be the wilderness, and _that_, the world. Even the thoughts of my own native Athens, that were called up, at every step, by the light, Grecian architecture of this imperial city, did not awaken one single regret in my heart—one wish to exchange even an hour of my desert for the best luxuries and honours that awaited me in the Garden. I saw the arches of triumph;—I walked under the superb portico, which encircles the whole city with its marble shade;—I stood in the Circus of the Sun, by whose rose‐coloured pillars the mysterious movements of the Nile are measured;—all these bright ornaments of glory and art, as well as the gay multitude that enlivened them, I saw with an unheeding eye. If they awakened in me any thought, it was the mournful idea, that, one day, like Thebes and Heliopolis, this pageant would pass away, leaving nothing behind but a few mouldering ruins,—like the sea‐shells found where the ocean has been,—to tell that the great tide of Life was once there! But, though indifferent thus to all that had formerly attracted me, there were subjects, once alien to my heart, on which it was now most tremblingly alive; and some rumours which had reached me, in one of my visits to the city, of an expected change in the policy of the Emperor towards the Christians, filled me with apprehensions as new as they were dreadful to me. The peace and even favour which the Christians enjoyed, during the first four years of the reign of Valerian, had removed from them all fear of a renewal of those horrors, which they had experienced under the rule of his predecessor, Decius. Of late, however, some less friendly dispositions had manifested themselves. The bigots of the court, taking alarm at the spread of the new faith, had succeeded in filling the mind of the monarch with that religious jealousy, which is the ever‐ready parent of cruelty and injustice. Among these counsellors of evil was Macrianus, the Prætorian Prefect, who was, by birth, an Egyptian, and—so akin is superstition to intolerance—had long made himself notorious by his addiction to the dark practices of demon‐worship and magic.