nopy of translucent blue,
iridescent and scintillating with a thousand colours, flicks of emerald
and crimson, of rose and of mauve that merge and dance together, divide
and reunite before the retina, until the gaze loses consciousness of all
colour save one all-pervading sense of gold.

In the distance the Capitol, temple-crowned, rearing its deified summit
upwards to the dome of heaven above, holding on its triple shoulders a
throng of metal gods, with Jupiter Victor right in the centre, a
thunderbolt in his hand which throws back ten thousand reflections of
dazzling light--another sun engendered by the sun. And to the west the
Aventine wrapped in its mantle of dull brown, its smooth incline barren
and scorched, and with tiny mud-huts dotted about like sleepy eyes that
close beneath the glare.

And far away beyond the Aventine, beyond the temples and palaces, the
blue ribbon of the Tiber flowing lazily to the sea: there where a
rose-coloured haze hung in mid-air, hiding with filmy, transparent veil
the vast Campania beyond, its fever-haunted marshes and its reed-covered
fastnesses.

The whole, a magnificent medley of cream and gold and azure, and deep
impenetrable shadows trenchant as a thunder cloud upon an horizon of
gold, and the moving crowd below, ivory and bronze and black, with here
and there the brilliant note of a snow-white robe or of crimson
head-band gleaming through dark locks.

Up and around the rostrum, noise that was almost deafening had prevailed
from an early hour. On one of the gradients some ten or a dozen scribes
were squatting on mats of twisted straw, making notes of the sales and
entries of the proceeds on rolls of parchment which they had for the
purpose, whilst a swarthy slave, belonging to the treasury, acted as
auctioneer under direct orders from the praefect of Rome. He was perched
high up aloft, immediately beneath the shadow of the yawning bronze
wolf; he stood bare-headed under the glare of the sun, but a linen tunic
covered his shoulders, and his black hair was held close to his head by
a vivid crimson band.

He shouted almost incessantly in fluent Latin, but with the lisp
peculiar to the African races.

A sun-tanned giant whose massive frame and fair hair, that gleamed ruddy
in the sun, proclaimed some foreign ancestry was the praefectus in
command of this tangled bundle of humanity.

He had arrived quite early in the day and his litter stood not far from
the rostrum; its c