did."

"Then, in the name of all the Gods, why did you join with them?"

"Because by the ruin of the great and noble, the poor must be gainers.
Because I owe what I can never pay. Because I lust for what I can never
win--luxury, beauty, wealth, and power! And if there come a civil strife,
with proscription, confiscation, massacre, it shall go hard with Caius
Crispus, if he achieve not greatness!"

"And you," said the man, turning short round, without replying to the
smith, and addressing the aged Bassus, "why did you join the plotters, you
who are so crafty, so sagacious, and yet so earnest in the cause?"

"Because I have wrongs to avenge," answered the old man fiercely; a fiery
flush crimsoning his sallow face, and his eye beaming lurid rage. "Wrongs,
to repay which all the blood that flows in patrician veins were but too
small a price!"

"Ha?" said the other, in a tone half meditative and half questioning, but
in truth thinking little of the speaker, and reflecting only on the
personal nature of the motives, which seemed to instigate them all. "Ha,
is it indeed so?"

"Man," cried the old conspirator, springing forward and catching him by
the arm. "Have you a wife, a child, a sister? If so, listen! you can
understand me! I am, as you see old, very old! I have scars, also, all in
front; honorable scars, of wounds inflicted by the Moorish assagays, of
Jugurtha's desert horsemen--by the huge broad swords of the Teutones and
Cimbri. My son, my only son fell, as an eagle-bearer, in the front rank of
the hastati of the brave tenth legion--for we had wealth in those days, and
both fought and voted in the centuries of the first class. But our fields
were uncultivated, while we were shedding our best blood for the state;
and to complete the ruin, my rural slaves broke loose, and joined
Spartacus the gladiator. Taken, they died upon the cross; and I was quite
undone. Law suits and usury ate up the rest; and, for these eight years
past, old Bassus has been penniless, and often cold, and always hungry.
But if this had been all, it is a soldier's part to bear cold and
hunger--but not to bear disgrace. Man, there have been gyves on these
legs--the whip has scarred these shoulders! Ye great Gods! the whip! for
what have the poor to do with their Portian or Valerian laws? Nor was this
all--the eagle-bearer left a child, a sweet, fair, gentle girl, the image
of my gallant boy, the only solace of my famishing old age. I told you s