angered, most imminently,
he perceived, his possession of power. He was of course greatly
enraged.

He caused Rhea to be shut up in close imprisonment, and as for the
boys, he ordered them to be thrown into the Tiber. The Tiber was at
some considerable distance from Alba; but it was probably near the
place where Rhea had resided in her retirement, and where the children
were born.

A peasant of that region was intrusted with the task of throwing the
children into the river. Whether his official duty in undertaking this
commission required him actually to drown the boys, or whether he was
allowed to give the helpless babes some little chance for their lives,
is not known. At all events he determined that in committing the
children to the stream he would so arrange it that they should float
away from his sight, in order that he might not himself be a witness
of their dying struggles and cries. He accordingly put them upon a
species of float that he made,--a sort of box or trough, as would seem
from the ancient descriptions, which he had hollowed out from a
log,--and disposing their little limbs carefully within this narrow
receptacle, he pushed the frail boat, with its navigators still more
frail, out upon the current of the river.

[Illustration: FAUSTULUS AND THE TWINS.]

The name of the peasant who performed this task was Faustulus. The
peasant also who subsequently,--as will hereafter appear,--found and
took charge of the children, is spoken of by the ancient historians as
Faustulus, too. In fact we might well suppose that no man, however
rustic and rude, could give his time and his thoughts to two such
babes long enough to make an ark for them, for the purpose of making
it possible to save their lives, and then place them carefully in it
to send them away, without becoming so far interested in their fate,
and so touched by their mute and confiding helplessness, as to feel
prompted to follow the stream to see how so perilous a navigation
would end. We have, however, no direct evidence that Faustulus did so
watch the progress of his boat down the river. The story is that it
was drifted along, now whirling in eddies, and now shooting down over
rapid currents, until at last, at a bend in the river, it was thrown
upon the beach, and being turned over by the concussion, the children
were rolled out upon the sand.

The neighboring thickets soon of course resounded with their plaintive
cries. A mother wolf who was sle