in summer was not discouraged. The privilege of augury itself,
according to tradition, had at one time belonged to his race; and if
you can imagine how, once in a way, an impressible boy might have an
inkling, an inward mystic intimation, of the meaning and consequences
of all that, what was implied in it becoming explicit for him, you
conceive aright the mind of Marius, in whose house the auspices were
still carefully consulted before every undertaking of moment.

The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally--and that is
all many not unimportant persons ever find to do--a certain tradition
of life, which came to mean much for the young Marius. The feeling
with which he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively that
of awe; though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty,
as he could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence
of so weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power
which Roman religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son.
[17] On the part of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the
husband's memory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together
with the recognition, as Marius fancied, of some costly self-
sacrifice to be credited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid
and shadowy enough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one
long service to the departed soul; its many annual observances
centering about the funeral urn--a tiny, delicately carved marble
house, still white and fair, in the family-chapel, wreathed always
with the richest flowers from the garden. To the dead, in fact, was
conceded in such places a somewhat closer neighbourhood to the old
homes they were thought still to protect, than is usual with us, or
was usual in Rome itself--a closeness which the living welcomed, so
diverse are the ways of our human sentiment, and in which the more
wealthy, at least in the country, might indulge themselves. All this