and, at this holy time, it should lead our thoughts on, as the Apostle also leads them"But GoD commendeth His love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, CHRIST died for us."

UTUMN had come down on the Alps. The wind swept more roughly over the blue face of Lake Leman; the howl of the wolf was heard nightly

through the forests of the Rhone; the mountains clothed themselves in whiter snow, and the woods put on those glorious tints which make the decline of the year so lovely. The peasants went more rarely from village to village; the gates of towns were shut up earlier, and opened later; the fresh cask of wine was broached for the winter, and the woodsellers went their last rounds with their creaking waggons.

The Emperor Maximian was at Octodurus,

-the place is now called Martigny; it lies where the river Drance falls into the Rhone, and so about half way between the lake of Geneva and the great S. Bernard. At Agaunum, near the foot of this mountain, the legion surnamed the Theban, lately arrived from the East, was in winter quarters; and it is to those quarters that I must now take you. True, in the olden times a stationary camp was a very sink of wickedness; and for a child or a woman to have ventured near it would have been a work of no small risk. But the Theban legion, to a man, were Christians; and you might have walked from one end to the other of their city-camp without fearing the least injury,— yes, and without hearing a word which you need have shrunk from understanding.

Up and down the Via Quintana of this camp, (it was the main road leading from east to west,) two officers were walking, and engaged in earnest conversation. They were both in the very vigour of manhood; both wore the scarlet paludamentum, bordered with purple; and on whatever subject they were talking, it certainly was not of a cheerful kind. It was

about the twelfth hour; the sun had just set behind Mount Voirons, but the southern Alps had put on that unearthly tint of rose, which makes the traveller that gazes on them afar off think them to be nothing less than an evening vision of Paradise. A hundred fires were sending up their blue smoke through the camp, for it was nearly supper-time. Here and there you might see a group of soldiers cooking some savoury mess; here and there a knot of busy talkers; and at the porta principalis dextra a large body of foragers were bringing in hay and wood. But still, as those two officers paced unweariedly backwards and forwards, many a glance was sent after them, and many a thought taken up by their movements.

"I wonder," said Valens, the centurion of the second century of the third maniple of the hastati, to Magnus, one of his soldiers, "what that despatch was about from the emperor ?" "Are you sure it was a despatch ?" inquired the soldier.

"Certain," replied the other. "I knew the bearer of it myself when we served in Greece, and he told me that Maximian had given it

into his own hands, and bade him lose no time in doing his errand; also he said that the Augustus was full of displeasure at somewhat that had crossed him."

"Well, then," said Magnus, "it is of that, the tribunes are now speaking."

be sure,

Magnus was right; it was of the emperor's despatch that the two officers, Maurice and Exuperius, were now holding council. And as heretofore I have taken you into the prison, the amphitheatre, the sick room, the market, the palace, that we might see how, in each and all, those early Christians played the man for CHRIST; So now we will walk up and down the Via Quintana with those two tribunes, and listen to what they are saying.

"It is even so, worthy Exuperius," said Maurice. "The Augustus has heard, and most truly, that there are thousands of Christians in Gallia Cisalpina, and among the Allobroges," that is, in Savoy and Dauphiné,"and he intends us to weed them out while the legion is in winter quarters."

"There is not a man in the legion," cried Exuperius, "that would thus serve the devil.