But the superfluous are not always unfortunate; we who knew Aurelius would never call him unfortunate. There are some--and more than ever in these days when even the strongest do not condemn outright, and when deaths less unpleasant to the executioner have been discovered--some who escape the necessity to toil and spin for others, and do not spend their ease in manacles. Many of the women among the hunted are not slaughtered as soon as caught. They are kept in artfully constructed and choicely decorated cages where their captors try to force them to sing over and over again the notes which were their allurement at first; a few survive to wear white locks and trouble with a new note the serenity of the palaces where their cages are suspended. The superfluous have been known to learn the ways of their superiors, to make little camps unmolested in the midst of the foreign land, to enjoy a life admired of many and sometimes envied, but insincerely. Some of the captives enslave their masters. Aurelius was one. From my earliest days Aurelius and rumours of him were much about me. Once he earned his bread in a great country house by looking after the books and writing letters. They lodged, fed, and clothed him, and gave him a small wage--he came from no one knew where, except that it must have been a gutter or a ditch, as he said, “between the moon and Mercury.” But he would tell children that he was begotten out of the moonlight by an owl’s hooting, or that he was born in a tent in the New Forest, where there were more leaves than money. It was a sort of grievance against him that he could always buy what he wanted, as a book for himself or a toy for a child. He can have been of little use as a letter-writer, as I see now. His writing looked as unfamiliar as Persian, and must have been laborious. It was suited to the copying of incantations, horoscopes, receipts for confectionery. It must often have startled the reader like a line of trees or flight of birds writing their black legend on the dawn silver. There was nothing in the meaning of his sentences, I think, to correspond with the looks of them. A few of his letters survive, and some notes on accessions to the library, etc.; but it is clear that they were written in a language foreign to the man, a loose journalistic English of the moment, neither classic nor colloquial, and they have no significance.