YOUNG FOLKS' HISTORY OF ROME.




CHAPTER I.

ITALY.


I am going to tell you next about the most famous nation in the world.
Going westward from Greece another peninsula stretches down into the
Mediterranean. The Apennine Mountains run like a limb stretching out of
the Alps to the south eastward, and on them seems formed that land,
shaped somewhat like a leg, which is called Italy.

Round the streams that flowed down from these hills, valleys of fertile
soil formed themselves, and a great many different tribes and people
took up their abode there, before there was any history to explain their
coming. Putting together what can be proved about them, it is plain,
however, that most of them came of that old stock from which the Greeks
descended, and to which we belong ourselves, and they spoke a language
which had the same root as ours and as the Greek. From one of these
nations the best known form of this, as it was polished in later times,
was called Latin, from the tribe who spoke it.

[Illustration: THE TIBER.]