* * * * *

What the full over-rich voice was calling up before her was a little
morning scene, as Virgil might have described it, passing in the hut of a
Latian peasant farmer, under Tiberius.

It opened with the waking at dawn of the herdsman Caeculus and his little
son, in their round thatched cottage on the ridge of Aricia, beneath the
Alban Mount. It showed the countryman stepping out of his bed into the
darkness, groping for the embers on the hearth, re-lighting his lamp, and
calling first to his boy asleep on his bed of leaves, then to their African
servant, the negro slave-girl with her wide mouth, her tight woolly hair.
One by one the rustic facts emerged, so old, so ever new:--Caeculus grinding
his corn, and singing at his work--the baking of the flat wheaten cakes on
the hot embers--the gathering of herbs from the garden--the kneading them
with a little cheese and oil to make a relish for the day--the harnessing
of the white steers under the thonged yoke--the man going forth to his
ploughing, under the mounting dawn, clad in his goatskin tunic and his
leathern hat,--the boy loosening the goats from their pen beside the hut,
and sleepily driving them past the furrows where his father was at work, to
the misty woods beyond.

With every touch, the earlier world revived, grew plainer in the sun, till
the listener found herself walking with Manisty through paths that cut the
Alban Hills in the days of Rome's first imperial glory, listening to his
tale of the little goatherd, and of Nemi.

* * * * *