Forum of the city of their fathers, and drove across the Latin
plain-land, and spoke their own dear, sonorous, yet half-polished
native tongue.

At last came evening; the sun sank lower and lower; now his broad red
disk hung over the crest of the western waves; now it touched them;
now it was gone, and only the lines of dying fire streamed behind
him--the last runners in his chariot train. Up from the cabin below
came the voice of the ship's steward, "Would their excellencies take
any refreshment?" But they did not go at once. They watched the fire
grow dimmer and dimmer, the pure light change to red gold, the red
gold to crimson, and the crimson sink away.

"Ah, carissima!" cried Drusus, "would that when the orbs of our lives
go down to their setting, they might go down like the sunlight, more
beautiful in each act of the very dying, as they approach the final
goal!"

"Yes, surely," replied Cornelia, touching her hands upon his head;
"but who knows but that Catullus the poet is wrong when he says the
sun of life will never rise save once; who knows but that, if our sun
set in beauty, it will rise again in grandeur even more?"

"My children," said Fabia, gently, "the future lies in the knowledge
of the gods; but out of the present we must shape our own future."

"No, delectissima," replied her nephew, "to do that we are all too
weak; except it be true, as Aratus the poet has said, 'that we men are
also the offspring of gods,' in which case Heaven itself must stoop to
give us aid."

But Cornelia's eyes had wandered down into the foam, still gleaming as
snow in the failing light.

"Ah!" she said, "the ages are long; if there be gods, their days are
our lifetimes, and we but see a little and know not what to think. But
to live a noble life will always be the fairest thing, whether death
be an unending sleep or the threshold to Pindar's Elysium."

And what more of grave wisdom might have dropped from her lips none
may relate, for her husband had shaken off the spell, and laughed
aloud in the joy of his strong life and buoyant hopes. Then they all
three laughed, and thought no more of sober things. They went down
into the cabin just as the last bars of light flickered out in the
west, and only the starlight broke the darkness that spread out over
the face of the sea.

II

Drusus, as he himself had predicted, never wrote a great treatise on
philosophy, and never drew up a cosmology that set at rest all the
pr