Petrus knew the models for the Good Shepherd and for the lions, and
declared to himself that these last were unsurpassable in truth, power,
and majesty. How eagerly must the young artist long to execute them in
hard stone, and to see them placed in the honored, though indeed pagan,
spot, which was intended for them. And now the bishop forbade him the
work, and the poor fellow might well be feeling just as he himself had
felt thirty years ago, when he had been commanded to abandon the immature
first-fruits of his labor.

Was the bishop indeed right? This and many other questions agitated the
sleepless father, and as soon as he heard that his wife had risen from
her bed to go to her son, whose footsteps he too could hear overhead, he
got up and followed her.

He found the door of the work-room open, and, himself unseen and unheard,
he was witness to his wife's vehement speech, and to the lad's
justification, while Polykarp's work stood in the full light of the
lamps, exactly in front of him.

His gaze was spell-bound to the mass of clay; he looked and looked, and
was not weary of looking, and his soul swelled with the same awe-struck
sense of devout admiration that it had experienced, when for the first
time, in his early youth, he saw with his own eyes the works of the great
old Athenian masters in the Caesareum.

And this head was his son's work!

He stood there greatly overcome, his hands clasped together, holding his
breath till his mouth was dry, and swallowing his tears to keep them from
falling. At the same time he listened with anxious attention, so as not