small
tiles, these _tessellae_, as religiously as ever Rachel stole her
teraphin. 'Wherever his feet went there went the tessellated pavement for
them to stand on. Even generals on foreign service carried in panniers on
muleback the little coloured cubes or _tessellae_ for laying down a
pavement in each camping-place, to be taken up again when they moved
forward. In England the same sweet emblems of the younger gods of poetic
legend, of love, youth, plenty, and all their happy naturalism, are found
constantly repeated.'[1] I am quoting these sentences from a local
historian, but you see how these relics have a knack of inspiring prose
at once scholarly and imaginative, as (for a more famous instance) the
urns disinterred at Walsingham once inspired Sir Thomas Browne's. To
continue and adapt the quotation--

Bacchus with his wild rout, Orpheus playing to a spell-bound audience,
Apollo singing to the lyre, Venus in Mars' embrace, Neptune with a host
of seamen, scollops, and trumpets, Narcissus by the fountain, Jove and
Ganymede, Leda and the swan, wood-nymphs and naiads, satyrs and fauns,
masks, hautboys, cornucopiae, flowers and baskets of golden fruit--what
touches of home they must have seemed to these old dwellers in the
Cambridgeshire wilds!

Yes, touches of home! For the owner of this villa (you may conceive) is
the grandson or even great-great-grandson of the colonist who first built
it, following in the wake of the legionaries. The family has prospered
and our man is now a considerable landowner. He was born in Britain: his
children have been born here: and here he lives a comfortable,
well-to-do, out-of-door life, in its essentials I daresay not so very
unlike the life of an English country squire to-day. Instead of chasing
foxes or hares he hunts the wolf and the wild boar; but the sport is
good and he returns with an appetite. He has added a summer parlour to
the house, with a northern aspect and no heating-flues: for the old
parlour he has enlarged the praefurnium, and through the long winter
evenings sits far better warmed than many a master of a modern
country-house. A belt of trees on the brow of the rise protects him from
the worst winds, and to the south his daughters have planted violet-beds
which will breathe odorously in the spring. He has rebuilt and enlarged
the slave-quarters and outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around the
atrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, where s