the Campus Martius and threw it into the Tiber; there it formed a heap
round which an island was afterwards formed. Brutus himself and his
cousin Aruns Tarquin soon after killed one another in single combat in a
battle outside the walls, and all the women of Rome mourned for him as
for a father.

Tarquin found a friend in the Etruscan king called Lars Porsena, who
brought an army to besiege Rome and restore him to the throne. He
advanced towards the gate called Janiculum upon the Tiber, and drove the
Romans out of the fort on the other side the river. The Romans then
retreated across the bridge, placing three men to guard it until all
should be gone over and it could be broken down.

[Illustration: BRUTUS CONDEMNING HIS SONS.]

There stood the brave three--Horatius, Lartius, and Herminius--guarding
the bridge while their fellow-citizens were fleeing across it, three men
against a whole army. At last the weapons of Lartius and Herminius were
broken down, and Horatius bade them hasten over the bridge while it
could still bear their weight. He himself fought on till he was wounded
in the thigh, and the last timbers of the bridge were falling into the
stream. Then spreading out his arms, he called upon Father Tiber to
receive him, leapt into the river and swam across amid a shower of
arrows, one of which put out his eye, and he was lame for life. A statue
of him "halting on his thigh" was set up in the temple of Vulcan, and he
was rewarded with as much land as one yoke of oxen could plough in a
day, and the 300,000 citizens of Rome each gave him a day's provision of
corn.

Porsena then blockaded the city, and when the Romans were nearly