costly articles industrial art produces are manufactured here. The roof
has not yet been put on many a factory in which busy workers are already
making beautiful things. Here the weaver's shuttle flies, yonder gold is
spun around slender threads of sheep guts, elsewhere costly materials are
embroidered by women's nimble fingers with the prepared gold thread.
There glass is blown, or weapons and iron utensils are forged. Finely
polished knives split the pith of the papyrus, and long rows of workmen
and workwomen gum the strips together. No hand, no head is permitted to
rest. In the Museum the brains of the great thinkers and investigators
are toiling. Here, too, reality asserts its rights. The time for
chimeras and wretched polemics is over. Now it is observing, fathoming,
turning to account, nothing more!"

"Gently, my young friend," Proclus interrupted the artist. "I know that
you, too, sat at the feet of some of the philosophers in the Museum, and
still uphold the teachings of Straton, which your fellow-pupil, King
Ptolemy, outgrew long ago. Yet he, also, recognised in philosophy, first
of all, the bond which unites the widely sundered acquisitions of the
intellect, the vital breath which pervades them, the touchstone which
proves each true or false. If the praise of Alexandria is to be sung,
we must not forget the library to which the most precious treasures of
knowledge of the East and West are flowing, and which feeds those who
thirst for knowledge with the intellectual gains of former ages and other
nations. Honour, too, to our King, and, that I may be just, to his
illustrious wife; for wherever in the Grecian world a friend of the Muses
appears, whether he is investigator, poet, architect, sculptor, artist,
actor, or singer, he is drawn to Alexandria, and, that he may not be
idle, work is provided. Palaces spring from the earth quickly enough."

"Yet not like mushrooms," Hermon interrupted, "but as the noblest, most