a cityfull of poor. But we needed our revenues for other things. Our
Cyraenian horses stood in marble stalls, and the great hall, in which my
father's friends were wont to meet, was like a temple. But you see how
the world takes possession of us, when we begin to think about it!
Rather let us leave the past in peace. You want me to tell you more of
myself? Well; my childhood passed like that of a thousand other rich
citizens' sons, only my mother, indeed, was exceptionally beautiful and
sweet, and of angelic goodness."

"Every child thinks his own mother the best of mothers," murmured the
sick man.

"Mine certainly was the best to me," cried Paulus. "And yet she was a
heathen. When my father hurt me with severe words of blame, she always
had a kind word and loving glance for me. There was little enough,
indeed, to praise in me. Learning was utterly distasteful to me, and
even if I had done better at school, it would hardy have counted for much
to my credit, for my brother Apollonius, who was about a year younger
than I, learned all the most difficult things as if they were mere
child's play, and in dialectic exercises there soon was no rhetorician in
Alexandria who could compete with him. No system was unknown to him, and
though no one ever knew of his troubling himself particularly to study,
he nevertheless was master of many departments of learning. There were
but two things in which I could beat him--in music, and in all athletic
exercises; while he was studying and disputing I was winning garlands in
the palaestra. But at that time the best master of rhetoric and argument
was the best man, and my father, who himself could shine in the senate as
an ardent and elegant orator, looked upon me as a half idiotic ne'er-do-
weel, until one clay a learned client of our house presented him with a
pebble on which was carved an epigram to this effect: 'He who would see