descent."

The emperor glanced triumphantly at Philostratus, and briefly exclaiming,
"That will do, I think," he clapped his hands, and instantly his old
chamberlain, Adventus, hurried in from the adjoining room, followed by
the whole band of "Caesar's friends." Caracalla, however, only said to
them:

"You can wait till I call you.--You, Adventus! I want the gem with the
marriage of Alexander." The freedman took the gem out of an ebony casket
standing on Caesar's writing-table, and Caracalla, holding the
philosopher by the arm, said, with excited emphasis:

"That gem I inherited from my father, the divine Severus. It was
engraved before that child came into the world. Now you shall see it,
and if you then say that it is an illusion--But why should you doubt it?
Pythagoras and your hero Apollonius both knew whose body their souls had
inhabited in a former existence. Mine--though my mother has laughed at
my belief, and others have dared to do the same-mine, five hundred years
ago, dwelt in the greatest of heroes, Alexander the Macedonian--a right
royal tabernacle!"

He snatched the gem from the chamberlain's hand, and while he devoured it
with his eyes, looking from time to time into Melissa's face, he eagerly
ran on:

"It is she. None but a blind man, a fool, a malignant idiot, could doubt
it! Any who henceforth shall dare mock at my conviction that I was
brought into the world to fulfill the life-span of that great hero, will
learn to rue it! Here--it is but natural--here, in the city he founded