Pontius met the Emperor's servant and his water-carriers and remarked,
loudly enough for Mastor to understand him, to Pollux who was with him:

"The architect's servant is getting Christians to wait upon his master
to-day. They are regular and sober workmen who do their duty silently
and well."

While Mastor was giving his master towels, and helping to dry and dress
him, he was far less attentive than usual, for he could not get the words
he had heard from the overseer's lips out of his mind. He had not
understood them all, but he had fully comprehended that there was a kind
and loving God who had suffered in his own person the utmost torments,
who was especially gracious to the poor, the miserable, and the bondsman,
and who promised to refresh them and comfort them, and to re-unite them
to those who had once been dear to them. "Come unto me," sounded again
and again in his ears, and struck so warmly to his heart that he could
not help thinking first of his mother, who, so many a time, when he was a
child, had called to him only to clasp him in her arms as he ran towards
her, and to press him to her heart. Just so had he often called his poor
little dead son, and the feeling that there could be any one who might
still call to him--the forsaken lonely man--with loving words to release
him from his griefs, to reunite him to his mother, his father, and all
the dear ones left behind in his lost and distant home, took half the
bitterness from his pain.

He was accustomed to listen to all that was said in the Emperor's
presence, and year by year he had learnt to understand more of what he
heard. He had often heard the Christians discussed, and usually as
deluded but dangerous fools. Many of his fellow-slaves, too, he had