“Turn round and get into the crowd again.”  The favorite immediately obeyed, and only too glad to escape from the crowd, which was a thing he detested, he sat down on a bench close to the Paneum, and looked dreamily at the ground while he thought of Selene and the nosegay he had sent her, neither seeing nor hearing anything of what was going on around him.

When the gaudy ship left the gardens of the Paneum and turned into the Canopic way, the crowd pursued it in a dense mass, hallooing and shouting.  Like a torrent suddenly swelled by a storm it rushed on, surging and growing at each moment, and carrying with it even those who tried to resist its force.  Thus even Hadrian and Pollux were forced to follow in its wake, and it was not till they found themselves in the broad Canopic way that they were able to come to a stand-still.  The broad roadway of this famous street was bordered on each side by a long vista of colonnade, and it extended from one end of the city to the other.  There were hundreds of the Corinthian columns which supported the roof that covered the footway, and near to one of these the Emperor and Pollux succeeded at last in effecting a halt and taking breath.

Hadrian’s first thought was for his favorite, and being averse to venturing himself once more to mix with the crowd, he begged the sculptor to go and seek him and conduct him safely.

“Will you wait for me here?” asked Pollux.

“I have known a pleasanter halting place,” sighed the Emperor.

“So have I,” answered the artist.  “But that tall door there, wreathed round with boughs of poplar and ivy, leads into a cook-shop where the gods themselves might be content to find themselves.”

“Then I will wait there.”

“But I warn you to eat as much as you can, for the Olympian table’ as kept by Lykortas, the Corinthian, is the dearest eating-house in the whole city.  None but the richest are his guests.”

“Very good,” laughed Hadrian.  “Only find my assistant a new mask and bring him back to me.  It will not ruin me quite, even if I pay for a supper for all three of us, and on a holiday one expects to spend something.”

“I hope you may not live to repent,” retorted Pollux.  “But a long fellow like me is a good trencherman, and can do his part with the wine-jar.”

“Only show me what you can do,” cried Hadrian after him as Pollux hurried off.  “I owe you a supper at any rate, for that cabbage stew of your mother’s.”

While Pollux went to seek the Bithyman in the vicinity of the Paneum, the Emperor entered the eating house, which the skill of the cook had made the most frequented and fashionable in Alexandria.  The place in which most of the customers of the house dined, consisted of a large open hall, surrounded by arcades which were roofed in on three of its sides and closed by a wall on its fourth; in these arcades stood couches, on which the guests reclined singly, or in couples,