‘It may really be so. They say that the Argonauts returned back through this country from the Southern Ocean, which must have been therefore far nearer us than it is now, and that they carried their mystic vessel over these very hills to the Syrtis. However, we have forgotten all about the sea thoroughly enough since that time. I well remember my first astonishment at the side of a galley in Alexandria, and the roar of laughter with which my fellow-students greeted my not unreasonable remark, that it looked very like a centipede.’
‘And do you recollect, too, the argument which I had once with your steward about the pickled fish which I brought you from Egypt; and the way in which, when the jar was opened, the servants shrieked and ran right and left, declaring that the fish-bones were the spines of poisonous serpents?’
‘The old fellow is as obstinate as ever, I assure you, in his disbelief in salt water. He torments me continually by asking me to tell him the story of my shipwreck, and does not believe me after all, though he has heard it a dozen times. “Sir,” he said to me solemnly, after you were gone, “will that strange gentleman pretend to persuade me that anything eatable can come out of his great pond there at Alexandria, when every one can see that the best fountain in the country never breeds anything but frogs and leeches?”’
As he spoke they left the last field behind them, and entered upon a vast sheet of breezy down, speckled with shrubs and copse, and split here and there by rocky glens ending in fertile valleys once thick with farms and homesteads.
‘Here,’ cried Synesius, ‘are our hunting-grounds. And now for one hour’s forgetfulness, and the joys of the noble art. What could old Homer have been thinking of when he forgot to number it among the pursuits which are glorious to heroes, and make man illustrious, and yet could laud in those very words the forum?’
‘The forum?’ said Raphael. ‘I never saw it yet make men anything but rascals.’
‘Brazen-faced rascals, my friend. I detest the whole breed of lawyers, and never meet one without turning him into ridicule; effeminate pettifoggers, who shudder at the very sight of roast venison, when they think of the dangers by which it has been procured. But it is a cowardly age, my friend—a cowardly age. Let us forget it, and ourselves.’
‘And even philosophy and Hypatia?’ said Raphael archly.
‘I have done with philosophy. To fight like a Heracleid, and to die like a bishop, is all I have left—except Hypatia, the perfect, the wise! I tell you, friend, it is a comfort to me, even in my deepest misery, to recollect that the corrupt world yet holds one being so divine—’
And he was running on in one of his high-flown laudations of his idol, when Raphael checked him.