Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/243

 that they would tempt the thief to make another raid, and then he would catch him.

After the Ave Maria he made friends with one of the angels who was just putting on his armour in the guard-room before taking his place in the line of sentries who encircle the city of God both by day and night. These angels, sir, are at the least a hundred feet high, and San Paolo asked one of them, whose post was near the gate, to hide him under his wings so that he could watch for the robber without being seen. The angel said that he was most happy to oblige; for San Paolo was a Roman of Rome, and very well thought of in heaven; so when the night came on San Paolo hid in the shadow of his feathers.

Presently he saw San Pietro go out of the gate, and the light, of which the bodies of the saints are made, went with him, so that, though the earth was in darkness, San Paolo could see plainly all that he did. And he picked up the two fresh pillars of yellow antique, and the two of red porphyry, and also the two of green antique in his hand, just as you, sir, would pick up six paintbrushes, and he carried them to his own church on the Monte Vaticano and set them up there. And when he had patched up the place from which he had taken the pillars so that they could not be missed, he came back into heaven.

San Paolo met him at the gate and accused him of thieving, but San Pietro answered blusteringly that he was the Prince of the Apostles, and that he had a right to all the best pillars for his church. San Paolo replied that once before he had had occasion to withstand San Pietro to the face because he was to be blamed (and that was at Antioch, sir), and then high words arose, and the two saints quarrelled so loudly that the Padre Eterno, sitting upon His Sapphire Throne, sent San Michele Arcangiolo to bring the disputants into His Presence. Then