goats pass into an olive garden. The red-brown earth has been freshly
turned amid the twisted trunks; the goats scatter, searching for the
patches of daisied grass still left by the plough. Guiltily the boy looks
round him--peers through the olives and their silvery foam of leaves, as
they fall past him down the steep. Then like one of his own kids he lowers
his head and runs; he leaves his flock under the olives; he slips into a
dense ilex-wood, still chill with the morning; he presses towards its edge;
panting he climbs a huge and ancient tree that flings its boughs forward
above the temple wall; he creeps along a branch among the thick small
leaves,--he lifts his head.

'The temple is before him, and the sacred grove. He sees the great
terrace, stretching to the lake; he hears the little waves plashing on its
buttressed wall.

'Close beneath him, towards the rising and the midday sun there stretches
a great niched wall girdling the temple on two sides, each niche a shrine,
and in each shrine a cold white form that waits the sun--Apollo the
Far-Darter, and the spear-bearing Pallas, and among them that golden Caesar,
of whom the country talks, who has given great gifts to the temple--he and
his grandson, the young Gaius.

'The boy strains his eye to see, and as the light strikes into the niche,
flames on the gleaming breastplate, and the uplifted hand, he trembles on
his branch for fear. Hurriedly he turns his look on the dwellings of the
priestesses, where all still sleeps; on the rows of shining pillars that
stand round about the temple; on the close-set trees of the grove that
stands between it and the lake.

'Hark!--a clanging of metal--of great doors upon their hinges. From the