bound the view. That Frangipani baron was in the right
of it, and I hope he got the value of his money out of the residence
which he built for himself. I doubt, however, that he did but little
good to those who lived in his close neighbourhood.

We had a very comfortable little banquet seated on the broken lumps of
stone which lie about under the walls of the tomb. I wonder whether the
shade of Cecilia Metella was looking down upon us. We have heard much
of her in these latter days, and yet we know nothing about her, nor can
conceive why she was honoured with a bigger tomb than any other Roman
matron. There were those then among our party who believed that she
might still come back among us, and, with due assistance from some
cognate susceptible spirit, explain to us the cause of her widowed
husband's liberality. Alas, alas! if we may judge of the Romans by
ourselves the true reason for such sepulchral grandeur would redound
little to the credit of the lady Cecilia Metella herself or to that of
Crassus, her bereaved and desolate lord.

She did not come among us on the occasion of this banquet, possibly
because we had no tables there to turn in preparation for her presence;
but had she done so, she could not have been more eloquent of things of
the other world than was Mrs. Talboys. I have said that Mrs. Talboys's
eye never glanced more brightly after a glass of champagne, but I am
inclined to think that on this occasion it may have done so. O'Brien
enacted Ganymede, and was perhaps more liberal than other latter-day
Ganymedes to whose services Mrs. Talboys had been accustomed. Let it
not, however, be suspected by any one that she exceeded the limits of a
discreet joyousness. By no means! The generous wine penetrated,
perhaps, to some inner cells of her heart, and brought forth thoughts in
sparkling words which otherwise might have remained concealed; but there
was nothing in what she thought or spoke calculated to give umbrage
either to an anchoret or to a vestal. A word or two she said or sung
about the flowing bowl, and once she called for Falernian; but beyond
this her converse was chiefly of the rights of man and the weakness of
women, of the iron ages that were past, and of the golden time that was
to come.

She called a toast and drank to the hopes of the latter historians of
the nineteenth century. Then it was that she bade O'Brien "fill high
the bowl with Samian wine." The Irishman took her at her word, and sh