Not to save his life could he have suppressed the hastily conceived distich, or have let slip such a justifiable claim to applause.

So, without heeding Melissa's remonstrance, he flung his sky-blue mantle about him in fresh folds, and declaimed with comical emphasis: "Down to earth did the god cast his son: but with mightier hand Through it, to Hades, Caesar flung his brother the dwarf." The versifier was rewarded by a shout of laughter, and, spurred by the approval of his friends, he declared he had hit on the mode to which to sing his lines, as he did in a fine, full voice.
But there was another poet, Mentor, also of the party, and as he could not be happy under his rival's triumph, he exclaimed: "The great dyer--for you know he uses blood instead of the Tyrian shell--has nothing of Father Zeus about him that I can see, but far more of the great Alexander, whose mausoleum he is to visit to-morrow.

And if you would like to know wherein the son of Severus resembles the giant of Macedon, you shall hear." He thrummed his thyrsus as though he struck the strings of a lyre, and, having ended the dumb prelude, he sang: "Wherein hath the knave Caracalla outdone Alexander?
He killed a brother, the hero a friend, in his rage." These lines, however, met with no applause; for they were not so lightly improvised as the former distich, and it was clumsy and tasteless, as well as dangerous thus to name, in connection with such a jest, the potentate at whom it was aimed.

And the fears of the jovial party were only too well founded, for a tall, lean Egyptian suddenly stood among the Greeks as if he had sprung from the earth.

They were sobered at once, and, like a swarm of pigeons on which a hawk swoops down, they dispersed in all directions.
Melissa beckoned to her brother to follow her; but the Egyptian intruder snatched the mantle, quick as lightning, from Alexander's shoulders, and ran off with it to the nearest pine-torch.