A crowd of citizens with causes, appeals, and petitions, were passing in and out from the patriarch's audience-room.

Peter and the archdeacon were waiting in the shade close by for the gathering of the parabolani, and talking over the morning's work in an earnest whisper, in which the names of Hypatia and Orestes were now and then audible.
An old priest came up, and bowing reverently enough to the archdeacon, requested the help of one of the parabolani.

He had a sailor's family, all fever-stricken, who must be removed to the hospital at once.
The archdeacon looked at him, answered an off-hand 'Very well,' and went on with his talk.
The priest, bowing lower than before, re-presented the immediate necessity for help.
'It is very odd,' said Peter to the swallows in the Serapeium, 'that some people cannot obtain influence enough in their own parishes to get the simplest good works performed without tormenting his holiness the patriarch.' The old priest mumbled some sort of excuse, and the archdeacon, without deigning a second look at him, said--'Find him a man, brother Peter.
Anybody will do.

What is that boy--Philammon--doing there?
Let him go with Master Hieracas.' Peter seemed not to receive the proposition favourably, and whispered something to the archdeacon....
'No.

I can spare none of the rest.