This changed aspect which the things round about had assumed really thrust itself less upon the vision than it aroused the emotions, or, more correctly, an unnamed sixth sense; this latter, however, was stimulated so strongly and persistently that a person endowed with it could not throw off the effect produced upon him. To be sure, of those estimable boarders already busy with their soup spoons at the two “alberghi” near the “ingresso,” hardly a man or woman would have been counted among those thus invested, but Nature had once bestowed this great attention upon Norbert Hanold and he had to submit to its effects, not at all because he had an understanding with it, however, for he wished nothing at all and desired nothing more than that he might be sitting quietly in his study with an instructive book in his hand, instead of having undertaken this aimless spring journey. Yet as he had turned back from the Street of Tombs through the Hercules gate into the centre of the city, and at Casa di Sallustio had turned to the left, quite without purpose or thought, into the narrow “vicolo,” suddenly that sixth sense was awakened in him; but this last expression was not really fitting, rather he was transported by it into a strangely dreamy condition, about half-way between a waking state and loss of senses. As if guarding a secret, everywhere round about him, suffused in light, lay deathly silence, so breathless that even his own lungs hardly dared to take in air. He stood at the intersection of two streets where the Vicolo Mercurio crossed the broader Strada di Mercurio, which stretched out to right and left; in answer to the god of commerce, business and trades had formerly had their abodes here; the street corners spoke silently of it; many shops with broken counters, inlaid with marble, opened out upon them; here the arrangement indicated a bakery, there, a number of large, convex, earthenware jugs, an oil or flour business. Opposite more slender, two-handled jars set into the counters showed that the space behind them had been a bar-room; surely in the evening, slaves and maids of the neighbourhood might have thronged here to get wine for their masters in their own jugs; one could see that the now illegible inscription inlaid with mosaic on the sidewalk in front of the shop was worn by many feet; probably it had held out to passers-by a recommendation of the excellent wine. On the outer wall, at about half the height of a man, was visible a “graffito” probably scratched into the plastering, with his finger-nail or an iron nail, by a schoolboy, perhaps derisively explaining the praise, in this way, that the owner’s wine owed its peerlessness to a generous addition of water. For from the scratch there seemed raised before Norbert Hanold’s eyes the word “caupo,” or was it an illusion. Certainly he could not settle it. He possessed a certain skill in deciphering “graffiti” which were