should elapse, to be involved in its desperate
mazes; to act conspicuous parts and undergo strange perils, in the dread
drama of the times.

They were of different years and sex--one, a magnificent and stately
matron, such as Rome's matrons were when Rome was at the proudest, already
well advanced in years, yet still possessing not merely the remains of
former charms, but much of real beauty, and that too of the noblest and
most exalted order. Her hair, which had been black in her youth as the
raven's wing, was still, though mixed with many a line of silver,
luxuriant and profuse as ever. Simply and closely braided over her broad
and intellectual temples, and gathered into a thick knot behind, it
displayed admirably the contour of her head, and suited the severe and
classic style of her strictly Roman features. The straight-cut eye-brows,
the clear and piercing eye, the aquiline nose, and the firm thin lips,
spoke worlds of character and decision; yet that which might have
otherwise seemed stern and even harsh, was softened by a smile of singular
sweetness, and by a lighting up of the whole countenance, which at times
imparted to those high features an expression of benevolence, gentle and
feminine in the extreme.

Her stature was well suited to the style of her lineaments; majestically
tall and stately, and though attenuated something by the near approach of
old age, preserving still the soft and flowing outlines of a form, which
had in youth been noted for roundness and voluptuous symmetry.

She wore the plain white robes, bordered and zoned with crimson, of a
patrician lady, but save one massive signet on the third finger of her
right hand she had no gem or ornament whatever; and as she sat a little
way aloof from her younger companions, drawing the slender threads with
many a graceful motion from the revolving distaff into the basket by her
side, she might have passed for her, whose proud prayer, that she might be
known not as the daughter of the Scipios but as the mother of the Gracchi,
was but too fatally fulfilled in the death-earned celebrity of those her
boasted jewels.

The other lady was smaller, slighter, fairer, and altogether so different
in mien, complexion, stature, and expression, that it was difficult even
for those who knew them well to believe that they were a mother and her
only child. For even in her flush of beauty, the elder lady, while in the
full splendor of Italian womanhood, must ever have