d olives. Nor have they any reverence for the villa of
the civic decurion or the Roman official. The neatly arranged kitchen
garden, with its cherries, plums, peaches, and apricots, is a waste; as
the slaves sit round, in the kitchen in the first court, at their coarse
evening meal, the room is filled with the invading force, and news comes
to them that the enemy has fallen upon the apples and pears in the
basement, and is at the same time plundering and sacking the preserves
of quince and pomegranate, and revelling in the jars of precious oil of
Cyprus and Mendes in the store-rooms.

They come up to the walls of Sicca, and are flung against them into the
ditch. Not a moment's hesitation or delay; they recover their footing,
they climb up the wood or stucco, they surmount the parapet, or they
have entered in at the windows, filling the apartments, and the most
private and luxurious chambers, not one or two, like stragglers at
forage or rioters after a victory, but in order of battle, and with the
array of an army. Choice plants or flowers about the _impluvia_ and
_xysti_, for ornament or refreshment, myrtles, oranges, pomegranates,
the rose and the carnation, have disappeared. They dim the bright
marbles of the walls and the gilding of the ceilings. They enter the
triclinium in the midst of the banquet; they crawl over the viands and
spoil what they do not devour. Unrelaxed by success and by enjoyment,
onward they go; a secret mysterious instinct keeps them together, as if
they had a king over them. They move along the floor in so strange an
order that they seem to be a tessellated pavement themselves, and to be
the artificial embellishment of the place; so true are their lines, and
so perfect is the pattern they describe. Onward they go, to the market,
to the temple sacrifices, to the bakers' stores, to the cookshops, to
the confectioners, to the druggists; nothing comes amiss to them;
wherever man has aught to eat or drink, there are they, reckless of
death, strong of appetite, certain of conquest....

Another and a still worse calamity. The invaders, as we have already
hinted, could be more terrible still in their overthrow than in their
ravages. The inhabitants of the country had attempted, where they could,
to destroy them by fire and water. It would seem as if the malignant
animals had resolved that the sufferers should have the benefit of this
policy to the full; for they had not got more than twenty miles beyond