on horseback. Riding presently from the inn,
he overtook Cornelius--of the Twelfth Legion--advancing carefully down
the steep street; and before they had issued from the gates of
Urbs-vetus, the two young men had broken into talk together. They were
passing along the street of the goldsmiths; and Cornelius must needs
enter one of the workshops for the repair of some button or link of his
knightly trappings. Standing in the doorway, Marius watched the work,
as he had watched the brazier's business a few days before, wondering
most at the simplicity of its processes, a simplicity, however, on
which only genius in that craft could have lighted.--By what
unguessed-at stroke of hand, for instance, had the grains of precious
metal associated themselves [168] with so daintily regular a roughness,
over the surface of the little casket yonder? And the conversation
which followed, hence arising, left the two travellers with sufficient
interest in each other to insure an easy companionship for the
remainder of their journey. In time to come, Marius was to depend very
much on the preferences, the personal judgments, of the comrade who now
laid his hand so brotherly on his shoulder, as they left the workshop.

Itineris matutini gratiam capimus,+--observes one of our scholarly
travellers; and their road that day lay through a country, well-fitted,
by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen a first acquaintance into
intimacy; its superficial ugliness throwing the wayfarers back upon
each other's entertainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension of
which, however, it would relieve, ever and anon, by the unexpected
assertion of something singularly attractive. The immediate aspect of
the land was, indeed, in spite of abundant olive and ilex, unpleasing
enough. A river of clay seemed, "in some old night of time," to have
burst up over valley and hill, and hardened there into fantastic
shelves and slides and angles of cadaverous rock, up and down among the
contorted vegetation; the hoary roots and trunks seeming to confess
some weird kinship with them. But that was long ago; and these pallid
hillsides needed only the declining sun, touching the rock with purple,
and throwing deeper shadow into [169] the immemorial foliage, to put on
a peculiar, because a very grave and austere, kind of beauty; while the
graceful outlines common to volcanic hills asserted themselves in the
broader prospect. And, for sentimental Marius, all th