Their blood be on their own head! It is not enough for them to blaspheme God and His church, to have the monopoly of all the cheating, fortune-telling, usury, sorcery, and coining of the city, but they must deliver my clergy into the hands of the tyrant ?' 'It was so even in the apostles' time,' suggested a softer but far more unpleasant voice.
'Then it shall be so no longer! God has given me the power to stop them; and God do so to me, and more also, if I do not use that power.
To-morrow I sweep out this Augean stable of villainy, and leave not a Jew to blaspheme and cheat in Alexandria.' 'I am afraid such a judgment, however righteous, might offend his excellency.' 'His excellency! His tyranny! Why does Orestes truckle to these circumcised, but because they lend money to him and to his creatures?
He would keep up a den of fiends in Alexandria if they would do as much for him! And then to play them off against me and mine, to bring religion into contempt by setting the mob together by the ears, and to end with outrages like this! Seditious! Have they not cause enough?
The sooner I remove one of their temptations the better: let the other tempter beware, lest his judgment be at hand!' 'The prefect, your holiness ?' asked the other voice slily.
'Who spoke of the prefect?
Whosoever is a tyrant, and a murderer, and an oppressor of the poor, and a favourer of the philosophy which despises and enslaves the poor, should not he perish, though he be seven times a prefect ?' At this juncture Philammon, thinking perhaps that he had already heard too much, notified his presence by some slight noise, at which the secretary, as he seemed to be, hastily lifted the curtain, and somewhat sharply demanded his business.

The names of Pambo and Arsenius, however, seemed to pacify him at once; and the trembling youth was ushered into the presence of him who in reality, though not in name, sat on the throne of the Pharaohs.
Not, indeed, in their outward pomp; the furniture of the chamber was but a grade above that of the artisan's; the dress of the great man was coarse and simple; if personal vanity peeped out anywhere, it was in the careful arrangement of the bushy beard, and of the few curling locks which the tonsure had spared.

But the height and majesty of his figure, the stern and massive beauty of his features, the flashing eye, curling lip, and projecting brow--all marked him as one born to command.

As the youth entered, Cyril stopped short in his walk, and looking him through and through, with a glance which burnt upon his cheeks like fire, and made him all but wish the kindly earth would open and hide him, took the letters, read them, and then began-- 'Philammon.

A Greek.