The Childhood of Rome Part 6

It was a long time, however, before they came in sight of any place that could be thought of as a home. Most of the country they saw was not inhabited except by a stray hut dweller here and there, getting a miserable living as he could,-simply because the land was not fit to live in. They crossed a rolling plain, where the marshes were full of unpleasant looking water, and the air at night was full of singing, stinging insects that drove the cattle frantic. It was not quite so bad near the fires. The insects seemed to dislike the smoke, or perhaps their wings could not carry them through the strong currents of air that the flames made around them. As soon as possible they moved up toward the higher land, and here at last they came in sight of the river of the yellow waters, the great river that ran down to the sea. Beyond that they could not go without meeting strange people and the wors.h.i.+p of strange and cruel G.o.ds.

Every night the beehive covers were taken off the baskets, and the fires were kindled, and in a round hut that was like a big basket lid, a bed of coals was made ready for the next day's journey. It was the duty of the ten little girls, the guardians of the fire, to take care of this, and they spent a great deal of time around the miniature temple of the fire G.o.d. One or another was always there.

One night when they were carefully covering the coals with fine ashes, Marcia and Tullia and Flavia looked up and saw two strange men standing near and looking down at them. They were startled but not at all frightened. The strangers would not be there if they were not friends; the men would not allow it. The two youths did not say anything; they watched for a few minutes, smiling as if they liked what they saw; then they turned away. They looked very much alike, and walked alike, and their voices were alike; but one was a little taller and darker than the other and always seemed to take the lead. They were not like the rude, ignorant, pagan people who sometimes came to stare and beg and perhaps to pilfer when they found some one's back turned. They looked like the people of Mars. But what could they be doing away out here?

The next day there was great news to tell. In the first place, the fathers of the colony had decided to stay here a few days, and let the cattle feed, and the women wash their clothing and rest for a little before going on. The water was good, and they had learned that it was a safe part of the country, though it was too rocky and barren to be a good place to live. But that was the smallest part of the news. The two youths were their own kinsmen, born of their own people, sons of a son of the old chief who had died in a far land many years ago.

This was wonder enough, to be sure, but there was more to come. The wicked uncle of the two brothers had killed their mother and father, and told one of his servants to take the twin boys down to the river and drown them.

They were babies then. The servant did not like to do this. He may have been afraid he would get into trouble if he did it and any of their people found it out later. He may have hated to do the cruel work, for they were strong and handsome little fellows. At any rate he put them in a basket and gave the basket to a slave, telling him to throw it into the river.

The river was in flood just then, and its banks were overflowed for miles on each side. There was water everywhere, and the ground was soft so that it was hardly possible to get down to the real river, where the water was deep and the current strong. If the children had been thrown into that, they would have drowned at once. But the slave did not take time to go all the way around the plain to the bank itself. He put the basket down in the first deep pool he found and left it to be carried down to the river, for the flood was beginning to ebb. Instead of that the basket lodged on a knoll and stayed there, not very far from the banks.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The little creatures inside the basket were not cubs or lambs]

In flood time, as Ursula had often heard her father the hunter say, animals are sometimes so frightened that the fierce and the timid take refuge together on some island or rocky ridge, without harming each other at all. This flood had come up suddenly and drowned some of them in their dens. A wolf that had lost her cubs in that way was picking her steps across the drenched plain, when she heard a noise-two noises-from a willow basket under a wild fig tree. She went quietly over there and looked in.

The little creatures inside the basket were not cubs or lambs, but they were hungry; any one would know that from the way they squalled. Wolf talk and man talk are quite different, but baby talk and cub talk are understood by all mothers. The wolf tipped the basket over with her paw, and the little things tumbled out in the cold and wet and cried louder than ever. Perhaps they thought she was a big dog. At any rate they crawled toward her, and plunged their strong little chubby hands into her fur, and crowed. When she lay down they snuggled close to her warm furry side, and she licked them all over.

A shepherd named Faustulus came that way when the flood had gone down, looking after a lost sheep. He found wolf tracks, and grasping his spear firmly, traced them to this knoll. He found the gray wolf curled up there with the two babies, asleep and warm and rosy, in the circle of her big, strong body.

The shepherd did not know just what to do. He thought that if he tried to take the children away from her she would fight, and they might be hurt, and he probably would be hurt himself. He decided to go and get help.

Later in the day he came back with some of his friends, and set a rude box-trap for the wolf, baited with fresh meat from a drowned calf. When they had trapped her they took her home and the children also, in their basket. They kept the wolf for some time, and she seemed quite tame; but at last she ran away and never came back. They fed the babies on warm milk, and the shepherd and his wife both fell in love with them from the very first. They heard a rumor after awhile, whispered about secretly as such things are, that the chief Amulius had had his two little nephews drowned. The shepherd guessed then who the foundlings might be, but he kept quiet about it. The city was not too far away, and some one might be sent even yet to kill the twins. In the language of the country the word for river was Rumon, and the word for an oar was Rhem. He named the boys Romulus and Remus, and those were all the names they had. They grew up to be fine active fellows, afraid of nothing and good at all manly sports. As they grew up, they gathered other young men outside the villages into a sort of clan, to protect the countryside against robbers, and to fight and hunt and earn a living in one way and another. They had a rocky stronghold on the mountain, where they lived, and whenever strangers came that way, some one was sent to see who and what they were. That was how the two brothers came to the camp of the colonists.

When this remarkable story was told, there was intense interest in the strange kinsmen. The girls were a little afraid of them. Their eyes were so bright and keen, their teeth so white, and their faces so bronzed and stern that they looked rather savage, especially in their wolf-skin mantles and tunics. But the boys all wished that they could join the patrol in the mountains.

For two days the colonists remained where they were, talking with the two brothers about the country. At last it was settled that the very hills where the two foundlings had grown up would be the best place for the colony to live!

Near the yellow river, there was a group of seven irregular hills which had never been inhabited, because the place was far from any town, and the neighboring chiefs had no especial use for it. There was good water on these hills and pasture enough for all the herds, if the woods were cleared off. The hills were so shaped that they could be defended, and from those heights they could see for miles and miles across the plain.

The wild face of Romulus changed and kindled as he talked, and Marcus Colonus saw that here in this youth, his kinsman, in spite of his adventurous and untrained life and his ignorance of the old and time-honored ways, he had found a true son of the Vitali, who loved his land and his people.

The colonists crossed the plain to the seven hills, with the brothers guiding them, and on the largest, which stood perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the river, they made their camp and set up the beehive temple for the last time. Here, they hoped, the sacred fire would burn year after year, and their people find a home.

IX

THE SQUARE HILL

The colony had chosen for their home one of the largest of the seven hills, squarish in form and more or less covered with woodland. They began at once to fence it around, to keep their beasts from wandering out and thieves and wild beasts from getting in, for all this country was very lonely. They had done this sort of thing so often since they left their old home that they did it quickly and rather easily. It was the habit of their people to save time and strength wherever they could, without being any less thorough. To do a thing right, in the beginning, saved a great deal of loss and trouble in the end.

While some cut down trees that grew on the land where they intended to make their permanent settlement, others trimmed off the branches as fast as the trees were down, and cut the logs to about the same length, and pointed the ends. The boys gathered up the branches and cut firewood from them. The brush that was not needed for the fires was made into loose f.a.gots and piled up on the logs, as they were laid along the line where the wall was to be. This made a kind of brush fence, not of much use against a determined enemy but better than none at all. Even this would keep an animal from bouncing into the camp without being heard, and in fact most wild beasts are rather suspicious of anything that looks like a trap.

When they had logs enough to begin fencing, all placed ready for use, they dug holes along the line they had marked out with a furrow, and planted the logs side by side as closely as they could, like large stakes. In any newly settled place, where trees are plenty, this is the most easily built fortification settlers can have, and the strongest. A stone or earth wall takes much longer to build. It is still called a palisade, a wall of stakes,-just as it was by men who built so, thousands of years ago and called a sharpened stake a "_palum_." A fence built of boards set up in this way is called a paling fence, and the boards are called palings. The word fence itself is only a short word for "defence,"-a defence made of pointed stakes planted in the ground.

The earth that was dug up was always thrown inside and formed the basis of a low earthwork that made the palisade firmer. It was made as high as possible from the outer side by being built on the edge of the hilltop so that the ground sloped away sharply from it. The pointed tops of the logs were a foot or two too high for a man to grasp at them and climb up, but from the inside the defenders could mount the earthwork and look through high loopholes.

There was a gateway at the top of a slope that was not so deep as the others, placed there so that if the colonists were outside and had to run for shelter, they could get in quickly. Almost anywhere else, a person who tried to get in and was not wanted would have to climb the hill under fire from the slingers and bowmen above. He must then get over the perfectly straight log wall, which afforded no foothold, because all the nubs of the branches had been neatly pared off, and force his way over the sawlike top in the face of men with long spears. No matter what sort of neighbors the colonists might have, they would think twice before they tried that.

The gate was made as strong as possible, of smaller tree trunks lashed together, and strengthened on the inside by crosspieces. When it was closed, two logs, one at the top and one at the bottom, were laid in place across it. Some one was always there to guard it, day and night, and could see through a little window who was coming up the hill.

Although strongholds like this had not been necessary for many years in their old home, there was one, built of stone in the ancient days, and never allowed to go to ruin. It seemed very adventurous to the boys to be erecting defences like that for their own families. But Romulus and Remus had told them that this would be the only way of being quite safe. They had a great deal that petty thieves might want to steal; and the chief Amulius might take it into his head to send a force to attack them, if he knew that so large a party of strangers had come in. When they had been there some years, and more people had joined the colony, the seven hills could be fortified so that n.o.body could take them. Colonus himself could see that, and it gave him a feeling of confidence and respect for his young cousin to know that he had seen it too.

By the time the palisade was finished, not only most of the land within it was clear, but the material for the huts was ready and some huts had been built. The timber was piled as it was cut, by the boys of the various families, on the lots marked out for the houses. The younger children cut reeds and gra.s.s for thatching and for the fodder of the cattle. They did this work in little companies and had a very pleasant time. Sometimes they caught fish, or shot waterfowl with their bows and arrows, or set snares for game.

Later the men would gather stone for a stone wall in place of the palisade, to run along the same line, and then the seasoned timbers of their log wall would still be good for building purposes. There was a steeper and narrower hill near the river which would make an excellent fortress. But the thoughts of the colony now were given to laying out farms.

They cleared and laid out wheat fields and orchards and vineyards as soon as they found land suitable. As any farmer knows, the sooner land is cultivated the more can be got out of it; it is not work that can all be done in a year, or two years, or three. This is especially true of land never used before for anything but pasture, and much of this had never been used even for that. Sheep do not like wet ground, and both sheep and cattle, unless they were tended constantly, might stray into the swampy low grounds. Drainage would help that land; when some of it was drained it would make rich lush meadows and golden grain fields. The land-loving Vitali could see visions of richer crops than any they had ever harvested, growing on that unpromising plain, if only they could have their way with it.

The children who were here, there and everywhere, watching all that was done and helping where they could, felt as if they were looking on at the making of a new world. It was really almost like a miracle-some of the ignorant marsh folk thought it was one-when that uncultivated hilltop, overgrown with bushes and wind-stunted trees and with the rocky bones of it cropping out here and there, became a trim encampment of orderly thatched huts. The beasts grew sleek and fat on the good fodder and grazing, and no one had appeared so far who had any evil designs. In fact, few persons came near them at all. It was as if they had the new world all to themselves.

In the house-building the children helped considerably after the men got the timber frames up. Instead of building stone walls, they were going to do what they had sometimes done before when a wall was run up temporarily,-use mud. They set stakes in rows along the walls, not close together like the palisade, but far enough apart for twigs and branches to be woven in and out between them like a very rough basketry. When this was done the men built a kind of pen on the ground, for a mixing bowl, and brought lime and sand and clay and water, and mixed it with tough gra.s.s into a sort of rough plaster. This was daubed all over the walls with wooden spades until the whole was quite covered, and when it hardened it would be weather-proof and warm. Small houses built in this "wattle and daub" fas.h.i.+on have been known to last hundreds of years.

The thatched roof was four-sided, running up to a hole in the middle to let out the smoke. When it rained, the rain dripped in around the edges of the hole and ran into a tank under it. The altar with the sacred fire was at one side of this tank, and when the room was dark the flame was reflected in the wavering, s.h.i.+ning depths of the water. The s.p.a.ce opposite the door, beyond the altar, was where the father and mother slept, and later it might be walled off into a private room. Other rooms could be part.i.tioned off along the sides. In later times there was a small entry or vestibule between the door and the inner rooms. But although the other rooms might vary in number and size and use, the _atrium_, the middle s.p.a.ce, in which were the altar and the _impluvium_ or water pool, remained the same. It was the heart of the home. Here the family wors.h.i.+p was held, and this was the common room of the family.

The plan of the encampment itself was like the house on a larger scale.

The huts were built around the inside of the palisade, with a separating s.p.a.ce or belt of land that was never plowed or built on-the _pomerium_, the s.p.a.ce "before the wall." In the middle was an open square which was to the town what the _atrium_ was to the house,-the common ground, where public wors.h.i.+p was held, announcements made, and public affairs social or religious carried on. Here was the beehive hut with the sacred fire, and all other temples or public buildings there might be would open on this square. The line of encircling houses made a sort of inner defense line, and even if any stranger could have climbed the wall for purposes of robbery or spying, it would have been hard for him to pa.s.s the houses without being found out.

This was the ancient way in which all the towns of this race were built.

As the towns increased in size, other gates were opened, and streets laid out, but always after the same general plan. And as a family never stayed indoors when it was possible to work or play in the open air, so the colonists did not stay inside their wall when they could go out on the common land and make it fruitful. Their descendants are seldom contented to live inside walls and streets, where they can have no land of their own. They find homes outside, where they can have land to dig up and plant and tend and watch, season after season,-and in the thousands of years since they began to plant and to reap, they have gone almost everywhere in the world.

X

THE KINSMEN

While the colonists were clearing the land on the Square Hill, building huts and laying out farms, they saw nothing of Romulus and Remus. The old shepherd Faustulus came up now and then to look at the work as it went on, and plainly thought these newcomers wonderful and superior beings. But the wolf's foster children were fighters, not husbandmen, and this work was not in their line at all.

The fathers of the colony were not altogether sorry that this was so. They felt that if the hunters, woodsmen, shepherds, soldiers of fortune, and outlawed men Romulus commanded should happen to quarrel with peaceable people like the settlers, it might create a very unpleasant state of things. The brothers themselves were friendly enough, but it was not certain whether they could keep their men from plunder or fighting if they tried. Such bands, so far as Colonus and his friends had known of them, were like a pack of wolves,-the chiefs only held their leaders.h.i.+p by being stronger, fiercer and more determined than the others. Their group of rude huts in the forest was not at all like a civilized town, from what they said of it, and they never seemed to give any attention to the G.o.ds or to wors.h.i.+p. Perhaps they did not know much about such things. Even those who came from civilized places had wandered about so much that they seemed to think one place as good as another. They had no idea of the feeling that made their home, to the colonists, dearer than any other place ever could be. It was so not because it was pleasanter, or because they had more comforts than others, but because it was home, the place where people knew and trusted one another and trusted in the unseen dwellers by the fire to protect and guide them, and to make them wise and just in their dealings with one another.

To the colonists there was a very great difference between the ways of different people. The words they used showed it. Civil life began when men lived in a city, but this was not a large settlement of miscellaneous persons, but a permanent home of men who all wors.h.i.+ped the same G.o.ds, and obeyed the same laws and took responsibility. A man who did his part in the life of such a place was a "citizen," and the life itself was "civilized," the life of men who served one another and the whole community-men, women and children-looking out for its future as they would for the prosperity of their own family. In fact, such a body of people usually began with a group of relatives, as this one had. Without this dependence on one another to do the right thing, there could not be civilization.

A "company" was a group who were so far friends as to eat bread together.

This in itself was a proof of a sort of friends.h.i.+p, for in eating a man had to lay down his weapons and be more or less off guard; when men ate together they were all off guard for the time. "Community" meant a group of families or persons bound together by kindred or friends.h.i.+p or common interest, and stronger for being bound together, as a bundle of sticks is stronger than separate sticks can be. "Religion" meant something stronger still, the binding together of people who felt the same sort of ties to the unseen world, who wors.h.i.+ped in the same way, and loved the same sweet, old, familiar prayers and chants, and believed in the same unseen rulers of life and death.

The various words for strangers outside these ties which bound them to their own people were just as expressive. Among farmers who lived on cleared land, within walls, the people who did not were "out of doors,"

the forest people, the "foreigners." Among a people who all spoke the same language, the thick-tongued country people, whose ideas were few, like their needs and their occupations, were the "barbarians,"-the babblers.

And in a place like the settlement they were making now, a little island of orderly, intelligent life in a waste of almost uninhabited wilderness, the scattered hut dwellers were the "pagans," the people of the waste. But almost every word that meant a civilized family or town had in it the idea of obligation. People must see that they could not be lawless and have any civil life at all. Civil life meant living together and living more or less by rules that were meant for the comfort and welfare of all.

Now the wild followers of Romulus could surely not be united by any such law as this. They fought as if Mars himself had taught them, the country folk said; but the wors.h.i.+p of this G.o.d of manhood meant a great many things besides fighting. No settlement could be strong where the men were free to fight one another, knew nothing of self-control, made no homes.

Just how much Romulus understood of this, Colonus was not sure. As it proved, he understood a great deal more than any one thought he did.