When we’d come in after our bath, the lad had two cups ready, one with the poison for Ptoeodorus, and the other for me, but somehow he made a mistake, giving me the poison, and Ptoeodorus the harmless cup. A moment later, while he was still drinking, I was lying my full length on the floor, and the wrong man was dead. Why do you find it amusing, Zenophantus? You oughtn’t to laugh at a friend.

Well, it was a droll thing to happen. But what did the old man do?

At first he was a little put out by the suddenness of it all, but then he understood what had happened, I suppose, and laughed himself to see what his butler had done.

But you oughtn’t to have taken that short cut; you’d have been surer of getting him here by the highway, even if he was a little slow in coming.