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92 DAKKNESS AND DAWN
affections of some favourite female flute-player from Syria OT
Spain.
Gambling, too, was the incessant diversion of these idle
hordes. Thefamilia of Pudens only consisted of the modest
number of thirty, but the slave population of Eome was of
colossal magnitude, and there was a terrible free-masonry
among the members of this wretched and corrupted class. The
companions of Onesimus were not chiefly to be found in the
household to which he belonged, but among the lewd idlers
whom he picked up as acquaintances in every street. With
these he played at dice, and sauntered about, and jested, and
drank, and squabbled, and betted, until he was on the high
road towards being as low a specimen of the slave-world
as any of them all a beautiful human soul caught in the
snare of the devil, lured by the glittering bait of vice, to
be dragged forth soon to die lacerated and gasping upon the
shore.
Hitherto a very little had sufficed him, but now he began
to need money money for gambling, money for the taverns,
money to spend in the same sins and follies in which the
slaves about him spent their days. He could indeed have
gained it, had he sunk so low, in a thousand nefarious ways;
and, gifted as he was with a quick and supple intelligence, as
well as with no small share of the beauty of his race, he
might have run away once more, or have secured his purchase
into many a pagan household, where he might have become
the pampered favourite of some luxurious master. Such, in
such a city as Rome, would have been the certain fate of any
youth like him, had it not been for the truths which he had
heard from Epaphras in the house of Philemon. When he
was most willing to forget those holy lessons they still hung"
about him and gave him checks. The grace of God still
lived as a faint spark, not wholly quenched, under the
whitening embers of his life. He could not forget that what
were now his pleasures had once been pains, arid sometimes
amid the stifling atmosphere of a dissipation which rapidly
tended to become pleasureless, his soul seemed to ' gasp
among the shallows,' sore athirst for purer air.
But he resisted these retarding influences, and by fiercer
draughts of excitement strove to dispel the pleadings of the
still small voice.