We pass over the mutual joy, the greetings, the administration of restoratives and creature comforts, the eager interrogations of Porphyry respecting the things his master had heard and seen in his trance, which proved to be unspeakable.

“And now,” said Plotinus, who with all his mysticism was so good a man of business that, as his biographers acquaint us, he was in special request as a trustee, “and now, concerning this roll of thine.  Is it possible that the accounts connected with the installation of a few abstemious lovers of wisdom can have swollen to such a prodigous bulk?  But indeed, why few?  Peradventure all the philosophers of the earth have flocked to my city.”

“It has, indeed,” said Porphyry evasively, “been found necessary to incur certain expenses not originally foreseen.”

“For a library, perhaps?” inquired Plotinus.  “I remember thinking, just before my ecstasy, that the scrolls of the divine Plato, many of them autographic, might require some special housing.”

“I rejoice to state,” rejoined Porphyry, “that it is not these volumes that have involved us in our present difficulties with the superintendent of the Imperial treasury, nor can they indeed, seeing that they are now impignorated with him.”

“Plato’s manuscripts pawned!” exclaimed Plotinus, aghast.  “Wherefore?”

“As part collateral security for expenses incurred on behalf of objects deemed of more importance by the majority of the philosophers.”

“For example?”

“Repairing bath and completing amphitheatre.”

“Bath!  Amphitheatre!” gasped Plotinus.

“O dear master,” remonstrated Porphyry, “thou didst not deem that philosophers could be induced to settle in a spot devoid of these necessaries?  Not a single one would have stayed if I had not yielded to their demands, which, as regarded the bath, involved the addition of exedrae and of a sphaeristerium.”

“And what can they want with an amphitheatre?” groaned Plotinus.

“They say it is for lectures,” replied Porphyry; “I trust there is no truth in the rumour that the head of the Stoics is three parts owner of a lion of singular ferocity.”

“I must see to this as soon as I can get about,” said Plotinus, turning to the accounts.  “What’s this?  To couch and litter for head of Peripatetic school!”

“Who is so enormously fat,” explained Porphyry, “that these conveniences are really indispensable to him.  The Peripatetic school is positively at a standstill.”

“And no great matter,” said Plotinus; “its master Aristotle was at best a rationalist, without perception of the supersensual.  What’s this?  To Maximus, for the invocation of demons.”

“That,” said Porphyry, “is our own Platonic dirty linen, and I heartily wish we were washing it elsewhere.  Thou must know, dear master, that during thy trance the theurgic movement has attained a singular development, and that thou art regarded with disdain by thy younger disciples as one wholly behind the age, unacquainted with the higher magic, and who can produce no other outward and visible token of the Divine favour than the occasional companionship of a serpent.”