as an adventure that afforded her an opportunity for the
conversations with her friend which she had missed so long.

Many of her young playmates had lived as hostages and probably as
captives in Roman camps and in the fortresses on the southern shore,
and been restored to liberty uninjured when truce or peace was
declared. That she could be detained or carried away against her will
she did not fear: the most powerful man in the camp was her protector.
Yet this peril constantly threatened her more and more closely.

Ausonius kept a sort of diary, in which before going to sleep he
recorded events, impressions, sketches of poems, and short bits of
verse--a custom whose regular observance he scarcely omitted even in
camp. A touch of pedantry was one of his characteristics. Yet the diary
was not a monologue, rather a sort of dialogue; for he addressed it in
the form of a letter to his oldest and most intimate friend, Arius
Paulus of Bigerri, rhetorician, but also an old soldier. Every three
months he collected what he had written and forwarded it to him to
receive his criticisms and answers on the margin of the manuscript when
returned.

So, during these days of involuntary leisure he wrote.

CHAPTER XXIII.

V. BEFORE THE KALENDS OF SEPTEMBER.

Ausonius sends greetings to his Paulus.

I wrote to you yesterday about the charming Barbarian child. Child? She
is one no longer. The delicate, yet lovely outlines of her form have
developed into exquisite roundness. And Barbarian? If she ever was one
she has ceased to be so, since Ausonius taught her the pomp of the
Latin language. How shall I describe her to you without drawing, no,
painting her? For it is precisely the charm of her coloring that is so
peerless. If only I had brought with me Paralos, my Ionian slave, who
painted the nymphs so exquisitely--you know--in my little dining hall
yonder, in the villa in the Province Noverus! And the expression--the
vivacity--in those ever varying features, now full of mischievous
wrath, now mirth, now jest, and anon of a sorrowful yearning which to
me is full of mystery.

And the dainty figure! Recently her leather sandals stuck fast in the
mire outside the camp ditch. How white and charming were the little
feet! How can they even support the figure, lightly as it floats along?
The muse which so long has shunned me has again returned in the form of
this Suabian girl: a fairer me