Rufinus possessed a sufficient fortune to secure him a comfortable
maintenance; and yet he was hard at work, in his own way, from morning
till night. Not that his labors brought him any revenues; on the
contrary, they led to claims on his resources; every one knew that he was
a man of good means, and this would have certainly involved him in
persecution if the Patriarch's spies had discovered him to be a Melchite,
resulting in exile and probably the confiscation of his goods. Hence it
was necessary to exercise caution, and if the old man could have found a
purchaser for his house and garden, in a city where there were ten times
as many houses empty as occupied, he would long since have set out with
all his household to seek a new home.

Most aged people of vehement spirit and not too keen intellect, adopt a
saying as a stop-gap or resting-place, and he was fond of using two
phrases one of which ran: "As sure as man is the standard of all things"
and the other--referring to his house--"As sure as I long to be quit of
this lumber." But the lumber consisted of a well-built and very spacious
dwellinghouse, with a garden which had commanded a high price in earlier
times on account of its situation near the river. He himself had
acquired it at very small cost shortly before the Arab incursion,
and--so quickly do times change--he had actually bought it from a
Jacobite Christian who had been forced by the Melchite Patriarch Cyrus,
then in power, to fly in haste because he had found means to convert his
orthodox slaves to his confession.

It was Philippus who had persuaded his accomplished and experienced
friend to come to Memphis; he had clung to him faithfully, and they
assisted each other in their works.

Rufinus' wife, a frail, ailing little woman, with a small face and