is of no consequence; or perhaps--which may the Fates
forfend--some disaster to an absent friend or even to the State. But
so far--and twelve days had passed since he had seen these strange
manifestations--he had received no news which confirmed his fears.

As he was thus musing he looked up at the sky, and he noticed the
presence of a new and unfamiliar star, which he had never seen before.
He was a close observer of the heavens and learned in astronomy, and
he felt quite certain that he had never seen this star before. It was
a star of peculiar radiance, large and white--almost blue in its
whiteness--it shone in the East, and seemed to put all the other stars
to shame by its overwhelming radiance and purity. While he was thus
gazing at the star it seemed to him as though a great darkness had
come upon the world. He heard a low muttering sound as of a distant
earthquake, and this was quickly followed by the tramping of innumerable
armies. He knew that the end had come. It is the Barbarians, he thought,
who have already conquered the world. Rome has fallen never to rise
again; Rome has shared the fate of Troy and Carthage, of Babylon,
and Memphis; Rome is a name in an old wife's tale; and little savage
children shall be given our holy trophies for playthings, and shall use
our ruined temples and our overthrown palaces as their playground. And
so sharp was the vividness of his vision that he wondered what would
happen to his villa, and whether or no the Barbarians would destroy the
image of Ceres on the terrace, which he especially cherished, not
for its beauty but because it had belonged to his father and to his
grandfather before him.

An eternity seemed to pass, and the tramp, tramp, tramp of the armies of
those untrained hordes which were coming from the North and overrunning
the world seemed to get nearer and nearer. He wondered what they would
do with him; he had no place for fear in his heart, but he remembered
that on the portico in the morning his freedman's child had been playing
with the pieces of a broken jar, a copper coin, and a dog made of
terra-cotta. He remembered the child's brown eyes and curly hair, its
smile, its laughter, and lisping talk--it was a piece of earth and
sun--and he thought of the spears of the Barbarians, and then shifted
his thoughts because they sickened him.

Then, just when he thought the heavy footsteps had reached the approach
of his villa, the vision changed. The noise of tram