our uncle--thou knowest what he likes: not too much water! And if they come, they will not eat us. They are fierce giants in battle--children after the victory. Have I not lived months among them as their prisoner? I fear nothing from them."

"Nothing for thyself--but for this sweet wife?"

Felicitas did not hear this question; she had taken up the child and gone with it into the house.

Fulvius shook his curly locks. "No! They would do nothing to her, that is not their custom. Certainly, did I fall, she would not be long left a widow. But there are people not in the bearskins of the barbarians, who would willingly tear her from the arms of her husband."

And he seized angrily the hammer in his belt.

"She must not suspect anything of it, the pure heart!" continued he.

"Certainly not. But thou must be on the watch. I met the Tribune lately in the office of the old money-lender."

"The usurer! the blood-sucker!"

"I was able, fortunately, to pay him my little debt. The slave announced me. I waited behind the curtain: I then heard a deep voice mention thy name--and Felicitas. I entered. The Tribune stood with the money-dealer. They were quickly silent when they perceived me. And just now, on the way here, whom should I overtake on the highway? Leo the Tribune, and Zeno the money-dealer! The latter pointed with his staff to thy house, the flat roof of which, with its little statues, projected above the trees. I guessed their conversation, and the object of their journey. Unseen I sprang from the road into the ditch, and hastened by the shorter way, the steep meadow path, to warn thee. Take care--they will soon be here."

"Let him only come, the miser! I have earned and carefully put away the sum that I owe him for marble supplied from Aquileia, and for the town taxes. My other creditors I have asked to wait, or rather promised them higher interest, and have put all the money together for this destroyer. But what does the Tribune want with me? I owe him nothing, except a knife-thrust for the look with which he devoured my precious one."

"Be careful! His knife is more powerful: it is the sword; and behind him stand the wild Mauritanian cavalry, and the Isaurian hirelings, whom we must pay with precious gold to protect us from the barbarians."

"But who defends us from the defenders? The Emperor in distant Ravenna? He rejoices if the Germans do not cross the Alps; he troubles himself no more about this land, which has been so long Roman."

"Except in extortionate taxes, to squeeze out our last blood-drops."

"Bah! The State taxes! It is many years since they were collected. No Imperial functionary ventures now over the mountains. I stand indeed here on Imperial soil. But what is the name of the man who is now Emperor, and to whom this bit of land belongs, of which he has never heard? Every two years another Emperor is made known to us--but only through the coinage."

"And that becomes ever worse."

"It cannot get worse; that is a comfort."

"A friend tells me that the taxes get more and more intolerable in Mediolanum, where there are still bailiffs and soldiers to levy them by force."

"And it may be the same with us," laughed the young man. "Who knows how much I am already in debt for these two acres of land?"

"And the roads of the Legions are overgrown with grass and brushwood."

"And the troops receive no wages."

"But they pay themselves by plundering the burghers, whom they should defend."

"And the walls of Juvavum are falling, the moats are dry, the sluices destroyed; the rich people go away, there only remain poor wretches like ourselves, who cannot leave."

"I wonder that the money-lender has not long ago moved with his great gold-bag over the Alps."

"I would not go, uncle, if I could; and why, indeed, could I not? My art, my trade will be honoured everywhere, so long as the Romans dwell in stone, not wooden houses, like the Germans. But I am firmly fixed to this soil. Many, many generations have my fathers dwelt here; they say since the founding of the colony by the Emperor Hadrian. They have cleared the forests, drained the marshes, made roads, raised fords, laid out house and garden, grafted the rich fruits on the wild apple and pear-trees; the climate itself has become milder. I know Italy, I have bought marble in Venetia, but I would rather live here on the old inheritance of my fathers."

"But if the barbarians come, wilt thou then also?"----

"Stay! I have my own thoughts about that. For us unimportant people it is better under the barbarians than"----

"Say not, than under the Emperor. Thou art a Roman!"

The stout Crispus said this very gravely, but the other laughed; the good uncle but little resembled a Roman hero. His neighbours declared that he modelled his statues of Bacchus from his own figure.

"Half-blood! My mother was a Noric Celt. Induciomara! That does not sound much of the Quirinal."

"And we do not stand under the Emperor, but under his hangman servants, Exchequer officials, and under the murderous fist of the Moorish and Isaurian troops. If I must serve barbarians, I prefer the Germans."

"But they are heathen."

"In part. A hundred and fifty years ago so were we all. My grandfather sacrificed secretly to Jupiter. And there are also Christians among them."

"Arians! heretics! worse than heathen, says the Holy Church."

"A few decades past our emperors were also heretics. And the Germans ask no one what he believes; but how heavily did our fathers suffer, if their faith did not exactly agree with that of the ruling emperor!"

"You take too lenient a view of the coming of the barbarians. They have set fire to many towns."

"Yes; but stone does not burn. The Romans quickly fit new timbers in the undestroyed walls. Then no German settles in a town. They pasture their herds on the land; it is the peasant in his farm who suffers from them. They take from him a third of his fields and pasturage. But the land profits thereby. It is now sadly dispeopled; nowhere is there a free peasant on a free soil. For the masters, whom they never see, who carouse in Naples or Byzantium, slaves cultivate the ground, or rather they do not cultivate it, they only work enough to keep them from starving. If they gained more the slave-master would take it from them. But it is different with plough and sickle, when hundreds of Germans press into the country, each with innumerable white-headed children. For so many children as these people have, I could not have imagined over the whole earth!--And in a few years the grown-up son builds his own wooden house in the cleared forest or the drained swamp. They swarm over the furrows like ants, and they soon throw away their old wooden plough-shares and copy the iron shares of the colonists, and in a few years the land bears so much more than formerly, that it richly feeds both conquerors and conquered."

"Yes, yes," nodded Crispus, "we have seen all that in the frontier lands, where they have settled. If the sons become too numerous they cast lots, and the third part, that draws the lot to migrate, wanders on wherever hawk or wolf directs; but never back, never towards the north!" sighed Crispus, "so they press ever nearer to us."----

"But they leave us our laws, our language, our God, our Basilica, and demand much, much less in tribute than the slave-master of the landlord or the