right across the head of Marcus, a Roman lad of about
eighteen, making his close, curly, brown hair glisten as if some of the
threads were of gold, while the light twinkled on the tiny dew-like
drops that stood out on the boy's brown forehead and by the sides of his
slightly aquiline nose.

The side of his head was down upon the table and his hands outspread
upon either side; a wax-covered tablet had escaped from his left, and a
pointed stylus, with which he had been making a line of characters upon
the wax, had slipped from his right fingers, for he was sleeping like a
top.

All was wonderfully still in the Roman villa, and, from time to time, a
slight puff of air which came cool from the mountains, but grew hot
before it reached the house, sent one of the vine strands swinging to
and fro like a pendulum, while the other, having secured itself to an
outer shutter by one of its tendrils, remained motionless.

The one that swung to and fro kept up its motion the more easily from
the fact that it was weighted by a closely-set bunch of grapes of a
pearly green on one side, but on the other, facing the sun, beginning to
be tinged with a soft purple hue. Upon one of these berries a great
fly, which seemed to be clad in a coat of golden armour, sat with its
face away from the sun as if listening to the sleeping boy, who every
now and then uttered a low, buzzing sound which seemed to have attracted
the fly from the outer sunshine to dart to the window with a similar
kind of hum, buzz round for a few moments, and then settle upon the
grape.

There was not much similarity in the two sounds, simply because the fly
made his by the rapid motion of the wings, while Marcus produced his
softly through his nose. In plain English, Marcus, the Roman boy, son
of Cracis, the famous senator, tired out by the heat, had gone to sleep
over his studies, snoring like an English lad of this year of grace,
nearly two thousand years later on in the progress of the world.

So Marcus snored, not loudly and unpleasantly, but with a nice, soft,
humming note; and the great, golden-green fly sat on the grape and
seemed to watch him.

It was very still in the simple Roman villa on the steep slope of the
hillside--a hill which looked like a young mountain, an offset of the
beautiful spur that ran upward from the vineyard farms and villas of the
campagna towards the purple shades of the great range far, far away.

But now and again other sounds fl