He had not advanced far, before the gaiety and confusion in the streets
appeared completely to bewilder him. He hastened to the nearest public
garden that he could perceive, and avoiding the frequented paths, flung
himself down, apparently fainting with exhaustion, at the foot of a
tree.
For some time he lay on the shady resting-place which he had chosen,
gasping painfully for breath, his frame ever and anon shaken to its
centre by sudden spasms, and his lips quivering with an agitation which
he vainly endeavoured to suppress. So changed was his aspect, that the
guards who had removed him from Alexandria, wretched as was his
appearance even then, would have found it impossible to recognise him
now as the same man whom they had formerly abandoned to slavery in the
mines of Spain. The effluvia exhaled from the copper ore in which he
had been buried for twelve years had not only withered the flesh upon
his bones, but had imparted to its surface a livid hue, almost death-
like in its dulness. His limbs, wasted by age and distorted by
suffering, bent and trembled beneath him; and his form, once so majestic
in its noble proportions, was now so crooked and misshapen, that whoever
beheld him could only have imagined that he must have been deformed from
his birth.
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