ess of
fulling cloth, and it generates thirst, so that it is but natural to find
a fountain close at hand, whereat the labourers could refresh their
parched throats. With what eagerness must the exhausted toilers during
those long summers of centuries past have leaned forward to press their
human lips to the cool mouth of the sculptured goddess that ejected with
pleasing gurgles a volume of water into the basin below! That this
fountain proved a boon to weary citizens is evident enough, for the
features of water-spouting Concordia are half worn away by thirsty human
kisses, and her suppliants' hands have left deep smooth furrows in the
stone-work of the basin, whereon they were wont to support their bodies,
so as to direct the cooling draught into the dry and dusty gullet. In
Italian cities to-day we can frequently observe some exhausted labourer
bend deftly downwards to snatch a drink of water from the mouth of some
fantastic figure in a public fountain. Who has not paused, for instance,
beside Tacca's famous bronze boar in the Florentine market-place without
noting an incident of this kind? If we ourselves are too dainty to place
our own aristocratic lips where our fellow-mortals have pressed theirs,
not so are the abstemious descendants of the ancient Romans, the Italians,
whose minds remain untroubled by any nasty-nice qualms of possible
infection.

Here then is the setting of the picture, and we must ourselves endeavour
to repeople the empty space with the crowds of high and low that once
collected here.

"It is high change, and the Forum is crowded. All Pompeii is here, and his
wife. _Patres conscripti_, inclined to corpulence, taking their
constitutional, exquisites lazily sauntering up and down the pavements;
decurions discussing the affairs of the nation, and the last news from
Rome; city magnates fussing, merchants chaffering, clients petitioning,
parasites fawning, soldiers swaggering, and Belisarius begging at the
gate.... It is a bright and animated scene. Beneath, the crowded Forum,
with its colonnades and statues, at one end a broad flight of steps
leading to the Temple of Jupiter, at the other a triumphal arch; on one
side the Temple of Venus and the Basilica; on the other the Macellum, the
Temple of Mercury, the Chalcidicum; overhead the deep blue sky. Mingled
with the hum of many voices and the patter of feet on the travertine
pavement are the ringing sounds of the stonemasons' chisels and hammers,
f