em true;
and the reason he gives, is what happened to Quintus Curtius Rufus,
who, having gone into Africa in the train of the quaestor or treasurer
for the Romans, walking one day towards evening under a portico, saw a
woman of uncommon height and beauty, who told him that she was Africa,
and assured him that he would one day return into that same country as
proconsul. This promise inspired him with high hopes; and by his
intrigues, and help of friends, whom he had bribed, he obtained the
quaestorship, and afterwards was praetor, through the favor of the
Emperor Tiberius.

This dignity having veiled the obscurity and baseness of his birth, he
was sent proconsul to Africa, where he died, after having obtained the
honors of the triumph. It is said that, on his return to Africa, the
same person who had predicted his future grandeur appeared to him
again at the moment of his landing at Carthage.

These predictions, so precise, and so exactly followed up, made Pliny
the younger believe that predictions of this kind are never made in
vain. The story of Curtius Rufus was written by Tacitus, long enough
before Pliny's time, and he might have taken it from Tacitus.

After the fatal death of Caligula, who was massacred in his palace, he
was buried half burnt in his own gardens. The princesses, his sisters,
on their return from exile, had his remains burnt with ceremony, and
honorably inhumed; but it was averred that before this was done, those
who had to watch over the gardens and the palace had every night been
disturbed by phantoms and frightful noises.

The following instance is so extraordinary that I should not repeat it
if the account were not attested by more than one writer, and also
preserved in the public monuments of a considerable town of Upper
Saxony: this town is Hamelin, in the principality of Kalenberg, at the
confluence of the rivers Hamel and Weser.

In the year 1384, this town was infested by such a prodigious
multitude of rats that they ravaged all the corn which was laid up in
the granaries; everything was employed that art and experience could
invent to chase them away, and whatever is usually employed against
this kind of animals. At that time there came to the town an unknown
person, of taller stature than ordinary, dressed in a robe of divers
colors, who engaged to deliver them from that scourge for a certain
recompense, which was agreed upon.

Then he drew from his sleeve a flute, at the sound of