f those under you--being
assured that by well filling this office you will serve your own
interests in these, and in all things besides.'

The letter concluded by directing the freedman to return to Rome on a
certain day, and to go to the farm-house at an appointed hour, there to
meet his master, who had further directions to give him, and who would
visit the newly acquired property before he proceeded on his journey to
Naples.

Nothing could exceed the perplexity of Carrio as he read the passage in
his patron's letter which we have quoted above. Remembering the
incidents attending Vetranio's early connection with Antonina and her
father, the mere circumstances of a farm having been purchased to
flatter what was doubtless some accidental caprice on the part of the
girl, would have little perplexed him. But that this act should be
followed by the senator's immediate separation of himself from the
society of Numerian's daughter; that she was to gain nothing after all
from these lands which had evidently been bought at her instigation,
but the authority over a little strip of garden; and yet, the
inviolability of this valueless privilege should be insisted on in such
serious terms, and with such an imperative tone of command as the
senator had never been known to use before--these were inconsistencies
which all Carrio's ingenuity failed to reconcile. The man had been
born and reared in vice; vice had fed him, clothed him, freed him,
given him character, reputation, power in his own small way--he lived
in it as in the atmosphere that he breathed; to show him an action,
referable only to a principle of pure integrity, was to set him a
problem which it was hopeless to solve. And yet it is impossible, in
one point of view, to pronounce him utterly worthless. Ignorant of all
distinctions between good and bad, he thought wrong from sheer
inability to see right.

However his instructions might perplex him, he followed them now--and
continued in after days to follow them--to the letter. If to serve
one's own interests be an art, of that art Carrio deserved to be head
professor. He arrived at the farm-house, not only punctually, but
before the appointed time, and calling the honest husbandman and the
labourers about him, explained to them every particular of the
authority that his patron had vested in him, with a flowing and
peremptory solemnity of speech which equally puzzled and impressed his
simple audience. He found