of an armed force.  It was owing to the narrowest chance—­or, as the old man would have it, to the interposition of great Isis, that his father had been so happy as to get away with him and the treasures he had brought from the temple at Philae.  Thus they had means to enable them to travel farther under an assumed name, and they finally settled in Alexandria.  Here the persecuted youth changed his name, Horus, to its Greek equivalent, and henceforth he was known at home and in the schools as Apollo.  He was highly gifted by nature, and availed himself with the utmost zeal of the means of learning that abounded in Alexandria; he labored indefatigably and dug deep into every field of Greek science, gaining, under his father’s guidance, all the knowledge of Egyptian horoscopy, which was not wholly lost even at this late period.

In the midst of the contentious Christian sects of the capital, both father and son remained heathen and worshippers of Isis; and when the old priest died at an advanced age, Horapollo moved to Memphis where he led the quiet and secluded life of a student, mingling only now and then with the astronomers, astrologers, and calendar-makers at the observatory, or visiting the alchemists’ laboratories, where, even in Christian Egypt, they still devoted themselves to attempts to transmute the baser into the noble metals.  Alchemists and star-readers alike soon detected the old man’s superior knowledge, and in spite of his acrid and often offensively-repellent demeanor, took counsel of him on difficult questions.  His fame had even reached the Arabs, and, when it was necessary to find the exact direction towards Mecca for the prayer niche in Amru’s new mosque, he was appealed to, and his decision was final.

Philippus had, some years since, been called to the old man’s bedside in sickness, and being then a beginner and in no great request, he had given the best of his time and powers to the case.  Horapollo had been much attracted by the young physician’s wide culture and earnest studiousness; he had conceived a warm liking for him, the warmest perhaps that he had ever felt for any fellow-human since the death of his own family.  At last the elder took the younger man into his heart with such overflowing affection, that it seemed as though his spirit longed to make up now for the stint of love it had hitherto shown.  No father could have clung to his son with more fervent devotion, and when a relapse once more brought him to death’s door he took Philippus wholly into his confidence, unrolled before his eyes the scroll of his inner and outer life from its beginnings, and made him his heir on condition that he should abide by him to the end.

Philippus, who, from the first, had felt a sympathetic attraction to this venerable and talented man, agreed to the bargain; and when he subsequently became associated with the old man in his studies, assisting him from time to time, Horapollo desired that he would help him to complete a work he hoped to finish before he died.  It was a treatise on hieroglyphic writing, and was to interpret the various signs so far as was still possible, and make them intelligible to posterity.