"However that may be, Totila always pleaded business, and was not to be persuaded. Imagine that! business after the eighth hour in Neapolis, when the most industrious are lazy! Naturally, it was only an excuse. I promised myself to find out his pranks, and, at evening, loitered near his house in the Via Lata. And truly, the very first evening he came out, looking carefully about him, and, to my surprise, in disguise. He was dressed like a gardener, with a travelling-cap well drawn down over his face, and a cloak folded closely about him. I dogged his footsteps. He went straight through the town to the Porta Capuana. Close to the gate stands a large tower, inhabited by the gate-keeper, an old patriarchal Jew, whom King Theodoric, on account of his great fidelity, entrusted with the office of warder. My Goth stood still before the house, and gently clapped his hands. A little side-door, which I had not remarked before, opened noiselessly, and Totila slipped in like an eel." "Ho, ho!" interrupted Piso eagerly, "I know both the Jew and his child Miriam--a splendid large-eyed girl! The most beautiful daughter of Israel, the pearl of the East! Her lips are red as pomegranates, her eyes are deep sea-blue, her cheeks have the rosy bloom of the peach." "Well done, Piso," said Cethegus, smiling; "your poem is very beautiful." "No," he answered, "Miriam herself is living poetry." "The Jewess is proud," grumbled Massurius, "she scorned my gold with a look as if no one had ever bought a woman before." "So the haughty Goth," said Lucius Licinius, "who walks with an air as if he earned all heaven's stars upon his curly head, has condescended to a Jewess." "So I thought, and I determined, at the next opportunity, to laugh at the youth for his predilection for musk. But nothing of the sort! A few days later, I was obliged to go to Capua. I started before daybreak to avoid the heat. I drove out of the town through the Porta Capuana, just as it was dawning, and as I rattled over the hard stones before the Jews' tower, I thought with envy of Totila, and said to myself that he was then lying in the embrace of two white arms. But at the second milestone from the gate, walking towards the town, with two empty flower-baskets hanging over his breast and back, dressed in a gardener's costume, just as before, whom should I meet but Totila! Therefore he was not lying in Miriam's arms; the Jewess was not his sweetheart, but perhaps his confidante; and who knows where the flower that this gardener cherishes blooms? The lucky fellow! Only consider that on the Via Capuana stand all the villas and pleasure-houses of the first families of Neapolis, and that in these gardens flourish and bloom the loveliest of women." "By my genius!" cried Lucius Licinius, lifting his wreathed goblet, "in that region live the most beautiful women of Italia--cursed be the Goths!"