Agias had actually come upon what he was right in considering a great piece of good fortune.  He had easily found the tenement in the Subura where Pratinas lodged, but to learn anything there that would be useful was a far more difficult affair.  He had hung around the place, however, as much as he dared, making his headquarters at a tavern conveniently near, and tried to learn Pratinas’s habits, and whether he ever took any visitors home with him.  All this came to little purpose till one morning he observed an old Ethiop, who was tugging a heavy provision basket, stagger up the street, through the nondescript crowd.  The old slave was being assailed by a mob of street gamins and low pedlers who saw in the contents of the hamper so much fair plunder.  These vagabonds had just thrown the Ethiop down into the mud, and were about to divide their booty, when Agias, acting on a generous impulse, rushed out from the tavern to the rescue.  Nimble, for his age powerful, and armed with a stout staff which he had caught up in the wine-shop to aid him, the young Greek won an easy victory over cowardly antagonists, put all the plunderers to flight, and lifted the old slave out of the mire.  The Ethiop was profuse in his thanks.

“And whose slave are you?” demanded Agias, well pleased to be out of the adventure.

“I’m Sesostris, servant of Pratinas the Greek.”

Agias pricked up his ears.  “And you live—­”

“In the top story of this tenement;” and Sesostris tried to pick up the hamper.

“Oh!” laughed his rescuer, “you must let me save you that trouble.  I will carry up the basket.  Your master is a brute to pile on such loads.”

Sesostris again fawned his gratitude, and Agias, with quickened wits and eyes alert, toiled up the dark stairway, and found himself at the top of the building.  He had “entered the enemy’s country.”  The Ethiop might not have been open to bribes, but he might be unlocked through friendship, and Agias never needed all his senses more than now.  They had reached the topmost flight of stairs, and Sesostris had stopped as if embarrassed whether to invite his deliverer in to enjoy some hospitality, or say him farewell.  Then of a sudden from behind the closed door came a clear, sweet, girlish voice, singing, in Greek:—­

  “O Aitne, mother mine:  A grotto fair
    Scooped in the rocks have I, and there I keep
  All that in dreams man pictures!  Treasured there
    Are multitudes of she-goats and of sheep,
    Swathed in whose wool from top to toe I sleep.”

It was an idyl of Theocritus, very well known by Agias, and without the least hesitation he took up the strain, and continued:—­

  “The fire boils my pot; with oak or beech
    Is piled,—­dry beech logs when the snow lies deep. 
  And storm and sunshine, I disdain them each
    As toothless sires a nut, when broth is in their reach."[98]

  [98] Calverly’s translation.