had remained a stone-cutter, but his sons had both completed their education in good schools in Alexandria.  The elder, Antonius, who already had a house of his own and a wife and children, was an architect and artist-mechanic; the younger, Polykarp, was a gifted young sculptor.  The noble church of the oasis-city had been built under the direction of the elder; Polykarp, who had only come home a month since, was preparing to establish and carry on works of great extent in his father’s quarries, for he had received a commission to decorate the new court of the Sebasteion or Caesareum, as it was called—­a grand pile in Alexandria—­with twenty granite lions.  More than thirty artists had competed with him for this work, but the prize was unanimously adjudged to his models by qualified judges.  The architect whose function it was to construct the colonnades and pavement of the court was his friend, and had agreed to procure the blocks of granite, the flags and the columns which he required from Petrus’ quarries, and not, as had formerly been the custom, from those of Syene by the first Cataract.

Antonius and Polykarp were now standing with their father before a large table, explaining to him a plan which they had worked out together and traced on the thin wax surface of a wooden tablet.  The young architect’s proposal was to bridge over a deep but narrow gorge, which the beasts of burden were obliged to avoid by making a wide circuit, and so to make a new way from the quarries to the sea, which should be shorter by a third than the old one.  The cost of this structure would soon be recouped by the saving in labor, and with perfect certainty, if only the transport-ships were laden at Clysma with a profitable return freight of Alexandrian manufactures, instead of returning empty as they had hitherto done.  Petrus, who could shine as a speaker in the council-meetings, in private life spoke but little.  At each of his son’s new projects he raised his eyes to the speaker’s face, as if to see whether the young man had not lost his wits, while his mouth, only half hidden by his grey beard, smiled approvingly.

When Antonius began to unfold his plan for remedying the inconvenience of the ravine that impeded the way, the senator muttered, “Only get feathers to grow on the slaves, and turn the black ones into ravens and the white ones into gulls, and then they might fly across.  What do not people learn in the metropolis!”

When he heard the word ‘bridge’ he stared at the young artist.  “The only question,” said he, “is whether Heaven will lend us a rainbow.”  But when Polykarp proposed to get some cedar trunks from Syria through his friend in Alexandria, and when his elder son explained his drawings of the arch with which he promised to span the gorge and make it strong and safe, he followed their words with attention; at the same time he knit his eyebrows as gloomily and looked as stern as if he were listening to some narrative of crime.  Still, he let them speak on