ts age a ripe fifty years.

'How deliciously the snow has cooled it!' said Pansa. 'It is just
enough.'

'It is like the experience of a man who has cooled his pleasures
sufficiently to give them a double zest,' exclaimed Sallust.

'It is like a woman's "No",' added Glaucus: 'it cools, but to inflame
the more.'

'When is our next wild-beast fight?' said Clodius to Pansa.

'It stands fixed for the ninth ide of August,' answered Pansa: 'on the
day after the Vulcanalia--we have a most lovely young lion for the
occasion.'

'Whom shall we get for him to eat?' asked Clodius. 'Alas! there is a
great scarcity of criminals. You must positively find some innocent or
other to condemn to the lion, Pansa!'

'Indeed I have thought very seriously about it of late,' replied the
aedile, gravely. 'It was a most infamous law that which forbade us to
send our own slaves to the wild beasts. Not to let us do what we like
with our own, that's what I call an infringement on property itself.'

'Not so in the good old days of the Republic,' sighed Sallust.

'And then this pretended mercy to the slaves is such a disappointment to
the poor people. How they do love to see a good tough battle between a
man and a lion; and all this innocent pleasure they may lose (if the
gods don't send us a good criminal soon) from this cursed law!'

'What can be worse policy,' said Clodius, sententiously, 'than to
interfere with the manly amusements of the people?'

'Well thank Jupiter and the Fates! we have no Nero at present,' said
Sallust.

'He was, indeed, a tyrant; he shut up our amphitheatre for ten years.'

'I wonder it did not create a rebellion,' said Sallust.

'It very nearly did,' returned Pansa, with his mouth full of wild boar.

Here the conversation was interrupted for a moment by a flourish of
flutes, and two slaves entered with a single dish.

'Ah, what delicacy hast thou in store for us now, my Glaucus?' cried the
young Sallust, with sparkling eyes.

Sallust was only twenty-four, but he had no pleasure in life like
eating--perhaps he had exhausted all the others: yet had he some talent,
and an excellent heart--as far as it went.

'I know its face, by Pollux!' cried Pansa. 'It is an Ambracian Kid. Ho
(snapping his fingers, a usual signal to the slaves) we must prepare a
new libation in honour to the new-comer.'

'I had hoped said Glaucus, in a melancholy tone, 'to have procured you
some oysters from Britain; but the win