cap
of liberty, the pileus, at his master's funeral? Junian Latin. Did
he disembowel his master's corpse? Junian Latin, once more, for his
trouble.

What a fine fellow this Norbanus must have been! What an eye for
everything, down to the details of a funeral procession, in which he
could find an excuse for emancipation! And that, too, in the midst of
the wars of Marius and Sylla in which he took part. I can picture
him seated before his tent, the evening after the battle. Pensive, he
reclines upon his shield as he watches the slave who is grinding notches
out of his sword. His eyes fill with tears, and he murmurs, "When peace
is made, my faithful Stychus, I shall have a pleasant surprise for you.
You shall hear talk of the Lex Junia Norband, I promise you!"

Is not this a worthy subject for picture or statue in a competition for
the Prix de Rome?

A man so careful of details must have assigned a special dress to these
special freedmen of his creation; for at Rome even freedom had its
livery. What was this dress? Was there one at all? No authority that
I know of throws any light on the subject. Still one hope remains: M.
Flamaran. He knows so many things, he might even know this.

M. Flamaran comes from the south-Marseilles, I think. He is not a
specialist in Roman law; but he is encyclopedic, which comes to the same
thing. He became known while still young, and deservedly; few lawyers
are so clear, so safe, so lucid. He is an excellent lecturer, and his
opinions are in demand. Yet he owes much of his fame to the works which
he has not written. Our fathers, in their day, used to whisper to one
another in the passages of the Law School, "Have you heard the news?
Flamaran is going to bring out the second volume of his great work. He
means to publish his lectures. He has in the press a treatise which will
revolutionize the law of mortgages; he has been working twenty years at
it; a masterpiece, I assure you." Day follows day; no book appears,
no treatise is published, and all the while M. Flamaran grows in
reputation. Strange phenomenon! like the aloe in the Botanical Gardens.
The blossoming of the aloe is an event. "Only think!" says the gaping
public, "a flower which has taken twenty springs, twenty summers, twenty
autumns, and twenty winters to make up its mind to open!" And meanwhile
the roses bloom unnoticed by the town. But M. Flamaran's case is still
more strange. Every year it is whispered that he is about to bl