Chapter LVII.—Great Grief.

And when all of us, along with my father, were agitated with sorrow and weeping, meantime Anubion came to us, intimating to us that Simon had fled during the night, making for Judæa.  But seeing our father lamenting and bewailing himself, and saying, “Wretch that I am, not to believe when I heard that he is a magician!  What has befallen wretched me, that on one day, being recognised by my wife and my sons, I have not been able to rejoice with them, but have been rolled back to the former miseries which I endured in my wandering!”—but my mother, tearing her dishevelled hair, bewailed much more bitterly,—we also, confounded at the change of our father’s countenance, were, as it were, thunderstruck and beside ourselves, and could not understand what was the matter.  But Anubion, seeing us all thus afflicted, stood like one dumb.  Then Peter, looking at us his sons, said:  “Believe me that this is your very father; wherefore also I charge you that you respect him as your father.  For God will afford some opportunity on which he shall be able to put off the countenance of Simon, and to recover the manifest figure of your father—that is, his own.”