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 regret him, for he had made more work than most bishops, having passed the seven years of his episcopate in a constant state of siege. Timothy, for whom no guards need be set, was a great improvement. Diffident and colloquial, he won everyone's heart, and obtained, for some reason or other, the surname of the Cat.

Thus the coup d'église had succeeded for the moment. But it had to reckon with another monk, a second Timothy, of whom, as events proved, the angel had really been thinking. He was Timothy Whitebonnet, so called from his headgear, and his life was more notable than the Cat's, for he lived at Canopus, where the air is so thick with demons that only the most robust of Christians can breathe. Canopus stood on a promontory ten miles east of Alexandria, overlooking the exit of the Nile. Foul influences had haunted it from the first. Helen, a thousand years ago, had come here with Paris on their flight towards Troy, and though the local authorities had expelled her for vagabondage, the ship that carried her might still be seen, upon summer nights, ploughing the waves into fire. In her train had followed Herodotus, asking idle questions of idle men; Alexander, called the Great from his enormous horns; and Serapis, a devil worse than any, who, liking the situation, had summoned his wife and child and established them on a cliff to the north, within sound of the sea. The child never spoke. The wife wore the moon. In their honour the Alexandrians used to come out along the canal in barges and punts, crowned with flowers, robed in gold, and singing spells of such potency that the words remained, though the