and the mallow in
the meadows. The pale olive-trees twisting their perforated trunks on
the slope of the hill gave me of their unctuous fruit. There I taught a
race of men with square heads, who had not, like the Greeks, a fertile
mind, but whose hearts were true, whose souls were patient, and who
reverenced the gods. My neighbour, a rustic soldier, who for fifteen
years had bowed under the burden of his haversack, had followed the
Roman eagle over land and sea, and had seen the enemies of the sovereign
people flee before him. Now he drove his furrow with his two red oxen,
starred with white between their spreading horns, while beneath the
cabin's thatch his spouse, chaste and sedate of mien, pounded garlic in
a bronze mortar and cooked the beans upon the sacred hearth, And I, his
friend, seated near by under an oak, used to lighten his labours with
the sound of my flute, and smile on his little children, when the sun,
already low in the sky, was lengthening the shadows, and they returned
from the wood all laden with branches. At the garden gate where the
pears and pumpkins ripened, and where the lily and the evergreen
acanthus bloomed, a figure of Priapus carved out of the trunk of a fig
tree menaced thieves with his formidable emblem, and the reeds swaying
with the wind over his head scared away the plundering birds. At new
moon the pious husbandman made offering of a handful of salt and barley
to his household gods crowned with myrtle and with rosemary.

"I saw his children grow up, and his children's children, who kept in
their hearts their early piety and did not forget to offer sacrifice to
Bacchus, to Diana, and to Venus, nor omit to pour fresh wines and
scatter flowers into the fountains. But slowly they fell away from their
old habits of patient toil and simplicity.

"I heard them complain when the torrent, swollen with many rains,
compelled them to construct a dyke to protect the paternal fields, and
the rough Sabine wine grew unpleasing to their delicate palate. They
went to drink the wines of Greece at the neighbouring tavern; and the
hours slipped unheeded by, while within the arbour shade they watched
the dance of the flute player, practised at swaying her supple limbs to
the sound of the castanets.

"Lulled by murmuring leaves and whispering streams, the tillers of the
soil took sweet repose, but between the poplars we saw along borders of
the sacred way vast tombs, statues, and altars arise, and the r