These modest savings institutions, paying the depositors a fair interest, are numerous all over the city; and such concerns also make loans for small sums on chattel mortgages--in short, doing a business that is sometimes highly legitimate, sometimes griping and usurious. Probus’s savings banks, like many others, are intrusted to slave managers (_institutores_) who are expected to invest their own _peculium_ in the business to insure their watchfulness and honesty. The management of such small establishments is naturally held in little social esteem, and the heads of Probus and Company affect to ignore their savings banks just as much as possible, although the gains from them are, perhaps, almost as great as from the dealings with the lofty _Clarissimi_ of the Senate. =204. Places of Safe Deposit: The Temple of Vesta.=--At all the banks there are very strong brass-bound treasure boxes carefully guarded and protected by elaborate locks. These boxes if not actually “safe deposit vaults” can defy any ordinary burglars. However, objects of great value, caskets of jewels, large sums of bullion, and the like, can be deposited in the Temple of Castor at the Old Forum, where (under the double sanctions of law and religion) the government undertakes their storage for a moderate fee. There is also a second government deposit vault at the Temple of Mars Ultor on the Augustan Forum, but this unfortunately “lost its helmet” (_i.e._ its reputation for inviolability) when it was successfully entered by burglars some years ago. There exists, however, a still safer place than the Temple of Castor, although obviously it can only give room to protect very small packets and highly precious documents. The Vestal Virgins in their House of Vesta, sacrosanct and absolutely guarded, have now in their keeping the wills of half of the Senators and of many other distinguished men. There they are safe from tampering not merely by common criminals, but by designing heirs and even by greedy Emperors; but this service, of course, is only at the disposal of the aristocracy. [Illustration: MONUMENT OF A HOSTLER.]