roaring up from the earth's heart, the
lightning shoots madly round the mountain top, the ground rocks, and the
air is darkened with ashes. The moment has come. One man is a leader,
but not all will follow him. He leads his small band swiftly down from
the heights, and they drive a flock and a little herd before them,
while each man carries his few belongings as best he can, and there are
few women in the company. The rest would not be saved, and they perish
among their huts before another day is over.

Down, always downwards, march the wanderers, rough, rugged, young with
the terrible youth of those days, and wise only with the wisdom of
nature. Down the steep mountain they go, down over the rich, rolling
land, down through the deep forests, unhewn of man, down at last to the
river, where seven low hills rise out of the wide plain. One of those
hills the leader chooses, rounded and grassy; there they encamp, and
they dig a trench and build huts. Pales, protectress of flocks, gives
her name to the Palatine Hill. Rumon, the flowing river, names the
village Rome, and Rome names the leader Romulus, the Man of the River,
the Man of the Village by the River; and to our own time the
twenty-first of April is kept and remembered, and even now honoured, for
the very day on which the shepherds began to dig their trench on the
Palatine, the date of the Foundation of Rome, from which seven hundred
and fifty-four years were reckoned to the birth of Christ.

And the shepherds called their leader King, though his kingship was over
but few men. Yet they were such men as begin history, and in the scant
company there were all the seeds of empire. First the profound faith of
natural mankind, unquestioning, immovable, inseparable from every daily
thought and action; then fierce strength, and courage, and love of life
and of possession; last, obedience to the chosen leader, in clear
liberty, when one should fail, to choose another. So the Romans began to
win the world, and won it in about six hundred years.

By their camp-fires, by their firesides in their little huts, they told
old tales of their race, and round the truth grew up romantic legend,
ever dear to the fighting man and to the husbandman alike, with strange
tales of their first leader's birth, fit for poets, and woven to stir
young hearts to daring, and young hands to smiting. Truth there was
under their stories, but how much of it no man can tell: how Amulius of
Alba Longa sle