mber toward morning. I was
at the point of starting, but my host would not allow me to be waked. At
seven o'clock, however, I rose, and then told my friend this dream. I
seemed to myself to be wandering disconsolately in some lonely place
when the great Marius met me. His lictors were with him, their _fasces_
wreathed with bays. 'Why are you so sad?' he asked me. 'I have been
wrongly banished from my country,' I answered. He then took my hand, and
turning to the nearest lictor, bade him lead me to his own Memorial
Hall. 'There,' he said, 'you will be safe.'" His friend declared that
this dream portended a speedy and honorable return. Curiously enough it
was in the Hall of Marius that the decree repealing the sentence of
banishment was actually proposed and passed.

For the most part he was miserably unhappy and depressed. In letter
after letter he poured out to Atticus his fears, his complaints, and his
wants. Why had he listened to the bad advice of his friends? He had
wished to stay at Rome and fight out the quarrel. Why had Hortensius
advised him to retire from the struggle? It must have been jealousy,
jealousy of one whom he knew to be a more successful advocate than
himself. Why had Atticus hindered his purposes when he thought of
putting an end to all his trouble by killing himself? Why were all his
friends, why was Atticus himself, so lukewarm in his cause? In one
letter he artfully reproaches himself for his neglect of his friends in
times past as the cause of their present indifference. But the reproach
is of course really leveled at them.

"If ever," he writes in one letter, "fortune shall restore me to my
country and to you, I will certainly take care that of all my friends;
none shall be more rejoiced than you. All my duty to you, a duty which I
must own in time past was sadly wanting, shall be so faithfully
discharged that you will feel that I have been restored to you quite as
much as I shall have been restored to my brother and to my children. For
whatever I have wronged you, and indeed because I have wronged you,
pardon me; for I have wronged myself far worse. I do not write this as
not knowing that you feel the very greatest trouble on my account; but
if you were and had been under the obligation to love me, as much as you
actually do love me and have loved me, you never would have allowed me
to lack the wise advice which you have so abundantly at your command."
This is perhaps a little obscure, as it