The TransformationThey decided that he who had brought him up here, the fishing-man, should carry the Chosen One down again in his arm to the boat. Very hard was the descent, almost harder than the climbing up had been; but they all got safely across the bare place to the ladder and down its rungs to the skiff, where they carefully deposited the bearer of the key upon the seat that ran round it; whereupon the fisher, rejoicing in the hope that he need not to all eternity ferry between stone and strand, laid to the oars with all his strength on the return journey.
With torturing anxiety did Liberius observe the penitent of the stone, and I question whether Probus’s misgivings over the looks of the Pope as he sat there on the bench stood very much in the rear of his ecclesiastical friend’s.
