Roman soldiers! And here he was face to face with them at last! His curiosity received a sudden check, however, as he found his arm seized by an officer, as he took him to be, from the gold ornaments on his helmet and cuirass, who lifted his vine-stock threateningly over the young monk's head, and demanded-- 'What's all this about?
Why are you not quietly in your beds, you Alexandrian rascals ?' 'Alexander's church is on fire,' answered Philammon, thinking the shortest answer the wisest.
'So much the better.' 'And the Jews are murdering the Christians.' 'Fight it out, then.

Turn in, men, it's only a riot.' And the steel-clad apparition suddenly flashed round, and vanished, trampling and jingling, into the dark jaws of the guardhouse-gate, while the stream, its temporary barrier removed, rushed on wilder than ever.
Philammon hurried on too with them, not without a strange feeling of disappointment.

'Only a riot!' Peter was chuckling to his brothers over their cleverness in 'having kept the prisoners in the middle, and stopped the rascals' mouths till they were past the guard-house.' 'A fine thing to boast of,' thought Philammon, 'in the face of the men who make and unmake kings and Caesars!' 'Only a riot!' He, and the corps of district visitors--whom he fancied the most august body on earth--and Alexander's church, Christians murdered by Jews, persecution of the Catholic faith, and all the rest of it, was simply, then, not worth the notice of those forty men, alone and secure in the sense of power and discipline, among tens of thousands ....

He hated them, those soldiers.
Was it because they were indifferent to the cause of which he was inclined to think himself a not unimportant member, on the strength of his late Samsonic defeat of Jewish persecutors?
At least, he obeyed the little porter's advice, and 'felt very small indeed.' And he felt smaller still, being young and alive to ridicule, when, at some sudden ebb or flow, wave or wavelet of the Babel sea, which weltered up and down every street, a shrill female voice informed them from an upper window, that Alexander's church was not on fire at all; that she had gone to the top of the house, as they might have gone, if they had not been fools, etc.

etc.; and that it 'looked as safe and as ugly as ever'; wherewith a brickbat or two having been sent up in answer, she shut the blinds, leaving them to halt, inquire, discover gradually and piecemeal, after the method of mobs, they had been following the nature of mobs; that no one had seen the church on fire, or seen any one else who had seen the same, or even seen any light in the sky in any quarter, or knew who raised the cry; or--or--in short, Alexander's church was two miles off; if it was on fire, it was either burnt down or saved by this time; if not, the night-air was, to say the least, chilly: and, whether it was or not, there were ambuscades of Jews--Satan only knew how strong--in every street between them and it....