A servant, carrying a skin-cask slung over his shoulders, was watering the flowers, faint with thirst; and these, arranged in fanciful vases, which made an artificial garden of the housetop, shook their drooping heads under the fresh and grateful shower, and seemed to answer it with smiles of a thousand blooms and rays. As the man stole softly to and fro about the roof, now approaching the lady and her son, now receding, he seemed, in spite of the foreign language in which they spoke, and in spite of the low and hushed tone they observed, to follow, with intense and breathless though stealthy excitement, the tenor of their conversation; while his figure, in the last evening rays, cast a long, shifting shadow that streaked with black the yellow flood to its farthest limit, climbed the parapet, broke upon its grail-work of balusters, and then was beheaded, for it flung off its head out of sight into empty space, leaving the calm bright air unblotted above the stone guard-wall.
An occurrence took place of which (that Wednesday evening) Paulus and his mother were witnesses--an occurrence in dumb show, the significance of which they were destined, only after several years, to learn; yet the incident was so singular, so strange, so impressive--it was such a picture in such a quarter--that when, long subsequently, the explanation came, they seemed to be still actually assisting in person at the scene which, while they beheld it, they had no means of understanding. We are going, in one moment, to relate that occurrence; and we must here request the reader to grant us his full belief and his confidence when we remark that, in comparison of his amusement, his profit, and that mental gallery of pictures to be his henceforth (which we try to give to all who honor these pages with a perusal), we feel the sincerest contempt for any mere display of scholarship or learning. For this reason, and this reason alone, and certainly from no scantiness, and still less from any lack of authorities, we shall almost disencumber our narrative of references to the ancient writers and recondite documents (such as the _Astronomic Formula of Philip Aridæus_) which establish as positive historical facts the more striking of the occurrences still to be mentioned. In one instance the intelligent reader will discern that the most sacred of all evidence supports what we have to record. But if we were to show with what nicety of precision much profane, yet respectable and even venerable, testimony accords with the passage here meant in the Acts of the Apostles, and how abundantly such testimony corroborates and supplements the inspired account, this book would cease to be what it aims at being, and would become a historical treatise of the German criticism school.[3]