inels, who sprang weapons in hand towards the newcomers.

'Back!' he said in a voice that thrilled like music. 'Since when has
Caesar feared children and students?'

To the children he seemed to speak in the only language they knew;
but the learned gentleman heard--in rather a strange accent, but quite
intelligibly--the lips of Caesar speaking in the Latin tongue, and in
that tongue, a little stiffly, he answered--

'It is a dream, O Caesar.'

'A dream?' repeated Caesar. 'What is a dream?'

'This,' said the learned gentleman.

'Not it,' said Cyril, 'it's a sort of magic. We come out of another time
and another place.'

'And we want to ask you not to trouble about conquering Britain,' said
Anthea; 'it's a poor little place, not worth bothering about.'

'Are you from Britain?' the General asked. 'Your clothes are uncouth,
but well woven, and your hair is short as the hair of Roman citizens,
not long like the hair of barbarians, yet such I deem you to be.' 'We're
not,' said Jane with angry eagerness; 'we're not barbarians at all. We
come from the country where the sun never sets, and we've read about
you in books; and our country's full of fine things--St Paul's, and the
Tower of London, and Madame Tussaud's Exhibition, and--' Then the others
stopped her.

'Don't talk nonsense,' said Robert in a bitter undertone.

Caesar looked at the children a moment in silence. Then he called a
soldier and spoke with him apart. Then he said aloud--

'You three elder children may go where you will within the camp. Few
children are privileged to see the camp of Caesar. The student and the
smaller girl-child will remain here with me.'

Nobody liked this; but when Caesar said a thing that thing was so, and
there was an end to it. So the three went.

Left alone with Jane and the learned gentleman, the great Roman found it
easy enough to turn them inside out. But it was not easy, even for him,
to make head or tail of the insides of their minds when he had got at
them.

The learned gentleman insisted that the whole thing was a dream, and
refused to talk much, on the ground that if he did he would wake up.

Jane, closely questioned, was full of information about railways,
electric lights, balloons, men-of-war, cannons, and dynamite.

'And do they fight with swords?' asked the General.

'Yes, swords and guns and cannons.'

Caesar wanted to know what guns were.

'You fire them,' said Jane, 'and they go bang, and people fall