ad ever experienced or ever
could experience through all the after years of her life.

CHAPTER XII.

A lovely garden adjoined the Caesareum, the palace in which Sabina was
residing. Balbilla was fond of lingering there, and as the morning of
the twenty-ninth of December was particularly brilliant--the sky and its
infinite mirror the sea, gleaming in indescribably deep blue, while
the fragrance of a flowering shrub was wafted in at her window like
an invitation to quit the house she had sought a certain bench which,
though placed in a sunny spot, was slightly shaded by an acacia. This
seat was screened from the more public paths by bushes; the promenaders
who did not seek Balbilla could not observe her here, but she could
command a view, through a gap in the foliage, of the path, which was
strewn with small shells.

To-day, however, the young poetess was far from feeling any curiosity;
instead of gazing at the shrubbery enlivened by birds, at the clear
atmosphere or the sparkling sea, her eyes were fixed on a yellow roll of
papyrus and she was impressing very dry details on her retentive memory.

She had determined to keep her word to learn to speak, write, and
compose verses in the Aeolian dialect of the Greek tongue. She had
chosen for her teacher Apollonius, the great grammarian, who was apt
to call his scholars "the dullards;" and the work which was the present
object of her studies was derived from the famous library of the
Serapeum, which far exceeded in completeness that of the Museum since
the siege of Julius Caesar in the Bruchiom, when the great Museum
library was burnt.

Any one observing Balbilla at her occupation could hardly have believed
that she was studying. There was no fixed effort in her eyes or on her
brow; still, she read line for line, not skipping a single word; only
she did it not like a man who climbs a mountain with sweat on his brow,
but like a lounger who walks in the main street of some great city, and
is charmed at every new and strange thing that meets his eye. Each time
she came upon some form of structure in the book she was reading that
had been hitherto unknown to her, she was so delighted that she clapped
her hands and laughed out softly. Her learned master had never before
met with so cheerful a student, and it annoyed him, for to him science
was a serious matter while she seemed to make a joke of it, as she did
of every thing, and so desecrated it in his eyes. After she h