th broad tiles, and there
was usually an open space in the centre to afford light to the inner
apartments.

The Romans were unacquainted with the use of chimnies, and were
consequently much annoyed by smoke. To remedy this, they sometimes
anointed the wood of which their fuel was composed, with lees of oil.

The windows were closed with blinds of linen or plates of horn, but more
generally with shutters of wood. During the time of the emperors, a
species of transparent stone, cut into plates, was used for the purpose.
Glass was not used for the admission of light into the apartments until
towards the fifth century of the christian era.

A villa was originally a farm-house of an ordinary kind, and occupied by
the industrious cultivator of the soil; but when increasing riches
inspired the citizens with a taste for new pleasures, it became the
abode of opulence and luxury.

Some villas were surrounded with large parks, in which deer and various
foreign wild animals were kept, and in order to render the sheep that
pastured on the lawn ornamental, we are told that they often dyed their
fleeces with various colours.

Large fish ponds were also a common appendage to the villas of persons
of fortune, and great expense was often incurred in stocking them. In
general, however, country houses were merely surrounded with gardens, of
which the Romans were extravagantly fond.

CHAPTER XXII.

_Marriages and Funerals._

A marriage ceremony was never solemnized without consulting the
auspices, and offering sacrifices to the gods, particularly to Juno; and
the animals offered up on the occasion were deprived of their gall, in
allusion to the absence of every thing bitter and malignant in the
proposed union.

A legal marriage was made in three different ways, called
_confarreatio_, _usus_ and _coemptio_.

The first of these was the most ancient. A priest, in the presence of
ten witnesses, made an offering to the gods, of a cake composed of salt
water, and that kind of flour called "_far_," from which the name of the
ceremony was derived. The bride and bridegroom mutually partook of this,
to denote the union that was to subsist between them, and the sacrifice
of a sheep ratified the interchange of their vows.

When a woman, with the consent of her parents or guardian, lived an
entire year with a man, with the intention of becoming his wife, it was
called _usus_.

_Coemptio_ was an imaginary purchase which the husban