fective in their black robes against the white road. When we came
to the village that was a _municipium_ under Augustus and a _colonia_
under Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and
self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by Scipio
Africanus two hundred years before Christ. Such cottage interiors as
we glimpsed seemed cleaner and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide
flat-brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely motionless,
but there were women bustling in and out in their work, and at one place
a little girl of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing
it joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry. We did not
meet with universal favor as we drove by; some groups of girls mocked
our driver; when we said one of them was pretty he answered that he had
seen prettier.

At the entrance to the ruins of the amphitheater which forms the
tourist's chief excuse for visiting Italica the popular manners softened
toward us; the village children offered to sell us wild narcissus
flowers and were even willing to take money in charity. They followed us
into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, toothless old custodian
who took possession of us as his proper prey and led us through
the moldering caverns and crumbling tiers of seats which form the
amphitheater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are broken off
from the mass and lie detached, but the mass keeps the form and dignity
of the original design; and in the lonely fields there it had something
august and proud beyond any quality of the Arena at Verona or the
Colosseum at Rome. It is mostly stripped of the marble that once faced
the interior, and is like some monstrous oval shaped out of the earth,
but near the imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in them
which restored the vision of the "grandeur that was Rome" pretty
well over the known world when this great work was in its prime. Our
custodian was qualified by his toothlessness to lisp like any old
Castilian the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own Spanish
was so slight and his _patois_ was so dense that the best we could do
was to establish a polite misunderstanding. On this his one word of
English, repeated as we passed through the subterranean doors, "Lion,
lion, lion," cast a gleam of intelligence which brightened into a vivid
community of ideas when we ended in his cottage, and he prepared to sell
us som