By this time I had grown very feeble and thin. Though I was changed into
an ass, L could not relish hay and grass and food of that sort, and I
derived scarcely any nourishment from it. I still had human tastes, as
well as human thoughts and feelings. Happily, I was very well off with
my new masters. Every evening, they brought home the remains of the
banquets they had served--bits of chicken, pork, fish and meat, and
various cakes; and these they put in their room while they went for a
bath before dinner. I used then to creep in and take all the best bits,
and when my two masters returned they began to reproach each other with
having filched the choicest pieces. In the meantime, I grew plump and
glossy and broad-backed, and as my masters observed I ate no hay, they
spied on me one evening.

They forgot their quarrel when they saw their ass picking out the best
bits with the taste of an epicure: and, bursting open the door, they
cried: "Let us try him with wine!" Naturally, I drank it very readily.

"We have got a treasure here," they said. They soon found that I was
intelligent, and understood human language. And after training me they
took me to Corinth, and exhibited me there, and made a great deal of
money. In a short time I became famous throughout Greece as the "Golden
Ass," and I was bought by the town for use in the public show. Nobody
thought that any watch need be kept over an animal as thoroughly
civilised as I was; and one evening I succeeded in escaping, and fled to
a lonely spot on the seashore.


_VI.--The Miracle of Isis and the Fate of Lucius_