tucco remains,
has repainted it in fresh colours. He knows that there are no gaps or
weak spots in his stockade fence--wood is always cheap. In a word he has
improved the estate; is modestly proud of it; and will be content, like
the old Athenian, to leave his patrimony not worse but something better
than he found it.

Sensible men--and the Romans were eminently that--as a rule contrive to
live decently, or, at least, tolerably. What struck Arthur Young more
than anything else in his travels through France on the very eve of the
Revolution seems to have been the general good-tempered happiness of the
French gentry on their estates. We may moralise of the Roman colonists as
of the French proprietors that 'unconscious of their doom the little
victims played'; but we have no right to throw back on them the shadow of
what was to come or to cloud the picture of a useful, peaceable, maybe
more than moderately happy life, with our later knowledge of disaster
mercifully hidden from it.

Although our colonist and his family have all been born in Britain, are
happy enough here on the whole, and talk without more than half meaning
it, and to amuse themselves with speculations half-wistful, of daring the
tremendous journey and setting eyes on Rome some day, their pride is to
belong to her, to Rome, the imperial City, the city afar: their windows
open back towards her as Daniel's did towards Jerusalem--_Urbs quam
dicunt Roman--the_ City. Along the great road, hard by, her imperial writ
runs. They have never subscribed to the vow of Ruth, 'Thy people shall be
my people and thy God my God.' They dwell under the Pax Romana, not
merely protected by it but as _citizens_. Theirs are the ancestral
deities portrayed on that unfading pavement in the very centre of the
villa--Apollo and Daphne, Bacchus and Ariadne--

For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young.

Parcels come to them, forwarded from the near military station; come by
those trade-routes, mysterious to us, concerning which a most
illuminating book waits to be written by somebody. There are parcels of
seeds--useful vegetables and potherbs, helichryse (marigold as we call
them now) for the flower garden, for the colonnade even roses with real
Italian earth damp about their roots. There are parcels of books,
too--rolls rather, or tablets--wherein the family reads about Rome; of
its wealth, the uproar of its traffic, the innumerable chim