Whatever the remembrances of his passage through the wall at the Pincian
Hill, and of the toil and peril succeeding it, which had revived when
the thunder first sounded in his ear, they now vanished as rapidly as
they had arisen, and left his wandering memory free to revert to the
scenes which the image of Serapis was most fitted to recall.
Recollections of his boyish enjoyments in the temple at Alexandria, of
his youth's enthusiasm, of the triumphs of his early manhood--all
disjointed and wayward, yet all bright, glorious, intoxicating--flashed
before his shattered mind. Tears, the first that he had shed since his
happy youth, flowed quickly down his withered cheeks. He pressed his
hot forehead, he beat his parched hand in ecstasy on the cold, wet steps
beneath him. He muttered breathless ejaculations, he breathed strange
murmurs of endearment, he humbled himself in his rapturous delight
beneath the walls of the temple like a dog that has discovered his lost
master and fawns affectionately at his feet.
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