Of the great empire, so tangled, so chaotic, with the germs of a new world no one could then foresee struggling into life through the decay of the old world crumbling to corruption, he could understand little. The miles of pasture and forest, the lakes and torrents among those Sabine hills, were to him like the hills and valleys of his own land. Every day there were trees to be felled, or fields to be tilled; and there was also the chase, of the beasts of prey, wolves and bears, with Bran in his element as an _aide-de-camp_. There were also men and women to be governed and employed. But here came in a dreary difference. Instead of men and women bound to him and his with the loyalty to chieftainship and the affection of kinship, those who had to be governed here were all slaves, of many races, linked to each other and their owner by no organic tie, but merely as mechanical atoms welded together by frost and fire. The worst evils of slavery were indeed mitigated there. Fabricius and Damaris were Christians; the estate was not too large for the servants of the household to be attached personally to them, and many of the labourers had wives and families held together, as in olden days no slaves could be, by the sanctity of Christian marriage. The evils of the Latifundia, the enormous farms, with the Ergastula, the workhouses inhabited by great gangs of celibate slaves under a slave-driver, were greatly modified on Fabricius’ land. But nevertheless the relations between employer and employed were those of slavery; and whether worked out mercifully or not, it was from Roman households that forty thousand Gothic slaves had fled forty years before to Alaric, at the first chance of liberation. Baithene felt, in a dim way, that however rude and undeveloped might be the social life in his own land, it was living and organic, and therefore capable of growth; whereas this was a mere mechanical conglomeration, always inwardly crumbling away, and ready at any blow from without to be shattered in a moment into ruin. Yet, not being responsible for it himself, and being in his small way royal, the largeness of heart and the habit of caring for others remained with him, so that he contrived to diffuse a good deal of life and interest and even gaiety around him, and thus greatly to relieve Fabricius.