l authority, which membership in a local
priestly college, hereditary in his house, conferred upon him. To set
a real value on [16] these things was but one element in that pious
concern for his home and all that belonged to it, which, as Marius
afterwards discovered, had been a strong motive with his father. The
ancient hymn--Fana Novella!--was still sung by his people, as the new
moon grew bright in the west, and even their wild custom of leaping
through heaps of blazing straw on a certain night in summer was not
discouraged. The privilege of augury itself, according to tradition,
had at one time belonged to his race; and if you can imagine how, once
in a way, an impressible boy might have an inkling, an inward mystic
intimation, of the meaning and consequences of all that, what was
implied in it becoming explicit for him, you conceive aright the mind
of Marius, in whose house the auspices were still carefully consulted
before every undertaking of moment.

The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally--and that is all
many not unimportant persons ever find to do--a certain tradition of
life, which came to mean much for the young Marius. The feeling with
which he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively that of awe;
though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as he
could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so
weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman
religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. [17] On the
part of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband's
memory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together with the
recognition, as Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice to be
credited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowy
enough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one long service
to the departed soul; its many annual observances centering about the
funeral urn--a tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white and
fair, in the family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowers
from the garden. To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places a
somewhat closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought still
to protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself--a
closeness which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of our
human sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the
country, might indulge themselves. All t