cea_) to the summer fallow, which Cato
is just now breaking up with the Campanian steers, for barley.

Scipio, a stanch Numidian, has gone to market with three asses loaded
with cabbages and asparagus. Villicus tells me that the poultry in the
fattening-coops (as close-shut as the Strasburg geese)[F] are doing
well, and he has added a _soupcon_ of sweetening to their barley-gruel.
The young doves have their legs faithfully broken, ("_obteras crura_")
and are placidly fattening on their stumps. The thrush-house is properly
darkened, only enough light entering to show the food to some three or
four thousand birds, which are in course of cramming for the market. The
_cochlearium_ has a good stock of snails and mussels; and the little
dormice are growing into fine condition for an approaching Imperial
banquet.

[Footnote F: "Locus ad hanc rem desideratur maxime calidus, et minimi
luminis, in quo singulae caveis angustioribus vel sportis inclusae
pendeant aves, sed ita coarctatae, _ne versari posslnt_."--Columella,
Lib. VIII. cap. vii.]

Villicus reports the clip of the Tarentine sheep unusually fine, and
free from burrs. The new must is all a-foam in the _vinaria;_ and around
the inner cellar (_gaudendem est!_) there is a tier of urns, as large as
school-boys, brimming with ripe Falernian.

If it were not stormy, I might order out the farm-chariot, or
_curriculum_, which is, after all, but a low, dumpy kind of horse-cart,
and take a drive over the lava pavement of the Via Tusculana, to learn
what news is astir, and what the citizens talk of in the forum. Is all
quiet upon the Rhine? How is it possibly with Germanicus? And what of
that story of the arrest of Seneca? It could hardly have happened, they
say, in the good old days of the Republic.

And with this mention, as with the sound of a gun, the Roman pastoral
dream is broken. The Campagna, the olive-orchards, the _columbarium_,
fall back to their old places in the blurred type of Columella. The
Campanian steers are unyoked, and stabled in the text of Varro. The
turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the palaces of Sylla and the
Caesars, give place to the spires of a New-England town,--southward of
which I see through the mist a solitary flag flying over a soldiers'
hospital. It reminds of nearer and deadlier perils than ever environed
the Roman Republic,--perils out of which if the wisdom and courage of
the people do not find a way, some new Caesar will point it w