gaoler procured his release on bail and permission to reside in a monastery not far from the city.
In spring the Court made its usual move "to the hills"—i. e. to B. Lapat or to Susa—and it was decided to have a general clearance of the city prisons on the occasion. Narses honourably surrendered himself, and his case thus came before the King personally, and was decided summarily. "Let him collect fire from 365 places, and put it in the temple, or let him be put to death." Again he refused to comply, and was therefore ordered for execution—the first man, apparently, to die in this persecution.
Crowds of Christians accompanied him to see the end, exciting the fears of the official in charge, till both they and the martyr assured him that they had no thought of obstructing "the King's justice," but merely wished to see the last of a friend. So, without malice and without display, he met his death, the authorities doing no more than they judged their duty, and the sufferer making no complaint of the penalty that befell him for following his conscience. Both parties acted as became honourable men, the Christian as became his faith. Only the clumsiness of the impressed executioner (a Christian, who refused to act till the martyr bade him "strike," for it should not be imputed to him) marred the nobility of the ending. Its tragedy lay, not in the death of the man who preferred it to treachery to his religion, but in the circumstances which gave honourable men no choice but mutually to inflict and submit to death.
It was impossible, however, for persecution to continue in this gentlemanly style. Bloodshed infuriated both sides, calling out hot zeal in the one party and massacre-lust in the other. Narses could not have been dead many days when a great
