ses without any outer windows, entered by one rough
door, were built close together, and those near the Forum had shops
outside them, low-browed places, dark but not deep, where the cloaked
keeper sat behind a stone counter among his wares, waiting for custom,
watching all that happened in the market-place, gathering in gossip from
one buyer to exchange it for more with the next, altogether not unlike
the small Eastern merchant of today.

Yet during more than half the time, there were few young men, or men in
prime, in the streets of Rome. They were fighting more than half the
year, while their fathers and their children stayed behind with the
women. The women sat spinning and weaving wool in their little brown
houses; the boys played, fought, ran races naked in the streets; the
small girls had their quiet games and, surely, their dolls, made of
rags, stuffed with the soft wool waste from their mothers' spindles and
looms. The old men, scarred and seamed in the battles of an age when
fighting was all hand to hand, kept the shops, or sunned themselves in
the market-place, shelling and chewing lupins to pass the time, as the
Romans have always done, and telling old tales, or boasting to each
other of their half-grown grandchildren, and of their full-grown sons,
fighting far away in the hills and the plains that Rome might have more
possession. Meanwhile the maidens went in pairs to the springs to fetch
water, or down to the river in small companies to wash the woollen
clothes and dry them in the shade of the old wild trees, lest in the sun
they should shrink and thicken; black-haired, black-eyed, dark-skinned
maids, all of them, strong and light of foot, fit to be mothers of more
soldiers, to slay more enemies, and bring back more spoil. Then, as in
our own times, the flocks of goats were driven in from the pastures at
early morning and milked from door to door, for each household, and
driven out again to the grass before the sun was high. In the old wall
there was the Cattle Gate, the Porta Mugonia, named, as the learned say,
from the lowing of the herds. Then, as in the hill towns not long ago,
the serving women, who were slaves, sat cross-legged on the ground in
the narrow court within the house, with the hand-mill of two stones
between them, and ground the wheat to flour for the day's meal. There
have been wonderful survivals of the first age even to our own time.

But that which has not come down to us is the huge vi