that no other sovereign should possess works by so consummate a master
of stonecraft. There the disciplinary measures ended. He did his best
to console the gifted artist who was fed, henceforward, on lobsters,
decorated with the order of the Golden Vine, and would doubtless have
been ennobled after death, had the Prince not predeceased the sculptor.

Such, briefly, is the history of Saint Dodekanus, and the origin of his
cult on Nepenthe.

Legends galore, often contradictory to this account and to one another,
have clustered round his name, as was inevitable. He is supposed to
have preached in Asia Minor; to have died as a young man, in his
convent; to have become a hermit, a cobbler, a bishop (of Nicomedia), a
eunuch, a politician. Two volumes of mediocre sermons in the Byzantine
tongue have been ascribed to him. These and other crudities may be
dismissed as apocryphal. Even his name has given rise to controversy,
although its origin from the Greek word DODEKA, signifying twelve and
alluding to the twelve morsels into which his body was superstitiously
divided, is as self-evident as well can be. Thus a worthy young canon
of the church of Nepenthe, Giacinto Mellino, who has lately written a
life of Saint Eulalia, the local patroness of sailors--her festival
occurs twelve days after that of Saint Dodekanus--takes occasion, in
this otherwise commendable pamphlet, to scoff at the old-established
derivation of the name and to propose an alternative etymology. He lays
it down that then pagan inhabitants of the island, desirous of sharing
in the benefits of Christianity which had already reached the mainland
but left untouched their lonely rock, sent a missive to the bishop
containing the two words DO DEKANUS: give us a deacon! The grammar is
at fault, he explains, because of their rudimentary knowledge of the
Latin tongue; they had only learnt, hitherto, the first person singular