United States or Namibia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Thus musing, she wandered alone through the curving walks; and this sort of mock-country landscape London loud, and even visible, beyond the high gloomy walls, and no escape from the windows of the square formal house seemed a type of the prison bounds of Rank to one whose soul yearns for simple loving Nature. Helen's revery was interrupted by Nero's joyous bark.
She was going to press the juice from every grape. A thousand odd years gone, she would have led the cry in Rome "Bread and the circus!" or "To the lions!" She would have disturbed Nero's complacency, and he would have played an obbligato instead of a solo at the burning. And she was malice incarnate.
"And I would slay her first," Norbanus said calmly; "but, as Lesbia threatened when I indignantly refused the proposal, Rufinus has but to ask Nero's approval, and before his orders my authority as a father goes for nothing. I see but one way. It has seemed to me for a long time, Beric, that you yourself felt more warmly towards Aemilia than a mere friend.
Still these threats and denunciations, though they were obviously prompted by a blind and temporary rage, which it might be reasonably supposed would soon subside, made a deep impression upon Nero's mind. In the first place, he was angry with his mother for daring to utter them.
"Hold on there, my lion boy! What's the matter? Don't do that!" called Nero's trainer to him in a kind voice. "What happened, anyhow? Why are you roaring so, and trying to get out of your cage? Don't you like it here in the circus?" Nero stopped roaring at once, and no longer dashed against the bars of his cage.
When the morning came, it brought with it some degree of composure; but the dreadful burden of guilt which pressed upon Nero's mind made him still unutterably wretched.
"Where are you going, Nero?" asked his mother of the lion boy cub one day, as she saw him starting out from the jungle cave. "Where are you going?" "Oh, just out to have some fun," he answered. "I'm going to play with Switchie." "Switchie," was the name of another lion boy cub, who lived in the cave next to Nero's.
They were unlettered, plebeian, unimportant. If there were distinguished converts, we do not know their names. Ecclesiastical history is silent as to distinguished persons except as persecutors, or as great contemporaries. We read of the calamities of the Jews, of Herod Agrippa, of Philo, of Nero's persecution, of the emperors, but not of Christians.
Some of the rain even dashed into the cages of Nero and the tiger, and the jungle cats liked the feel of it as much as did the other circus beasts. But the rain did something else, too. It made the roads very soft and slippery with mud, and in the middle of the night, when Nero's cage was being pulled up a steep hill, something broke on the wagon.
Being thus deprived of their leader, the conspirators gave up all hope of effecting the revolution, and thought only of the means of screening themselves from Nero's vengeance. In the mean time, Epicharis had so far recovered during the night, that on the following morning it was determined to bring her again to the torture.
Word Of The Day