innocent!'

'There is no more sedition in him than there is in me,' roared a fat
butcher, who looked as ready to fell a man as an ox. 'He was always
the first and the last to clap the holy patriarch at sermon.'

'Dear tender soul,' whimpered a woman; 'and I said to him only this
morning, why don't you flog my boys, Master Hierax? how can you
expect them to learn if they are not flogged? And he said, he never
could abide the sight of a rod, it made his back tingle so.'

'Which was plainly a prophecy!'

'And proves him innocent; for how could he prophesy if he was not
one of the holy ones?'

'Monks, to the rescue! Hierax, a Christian, is taken and tortured
in the theatre!' thundered a wild hermit, his beard and hair
streaming about his chest and shoulders.

'Nitria! Nitria! For God and the mother of God, monks of Nitria!
Down with the Jewish slanderers! Down with heathen tyrants!'--And
the mob, reinforced as if by magic by hundreds from without, swept
down the huge vaulted passage, carrying Philammon and the porter
with them.

'My friends,' quoth the little man, trying to look philosophically
calm, though he was fairly off his legs, and hanging between heaven
and earth on the elbows of the bystanders, 'whence this tumult?'