ransoming from her rascally master, who of course raises his price to an exorbitant figure as soon as he finds out the young gentleman's infatuation. Antipho, his cousin, had for a long time given promise of great steadiness: but these still waters run deep, and he plunges all at once into a romantic passion for a beautiful Cinderella, whom he discovers with bare feet and in a shabby dress, mourning over a dead mother who has left her a portionless orphan. And, finding that she is of free birth, he actually marries her. His acquaintance Phormio—whose friendship is at any young man's service who can give a good dinner—has suggested to him a plan by which he may in some degree escape his father's anger at this very imprudent match. There is a law at Athens which, like the old Levitical law, obliges the next of kin who is available to marry an orphan of the family. Phormio undertakes to appear before the proper court on behalf of the girl, and to bring evidence that Antipho is her nearest unmarried male relative: and, since the young lover of course makes no attempt to disprove it, the court gives judgment that he is to make her his wife, which he does forthwith.
All this has taken place before the action of the piece begins. And now a letter has arrived from Demipho to say that he is coming home, and both the son and Geta are in great alarm as to how he will take the news which awaits him. Antipho, like others who have married in haste, is beginning to feel something very like repentance at leisure; he feels, he says, in the position of the man in the proverb who has "got a wolf by the ears—he can neither hold her nor let
