The Mons Vaticanus, low, and excluded from the city limits, was never reckoned one of the seven hills; of all the Roman district it was considered the least healthy part, the land being swampy and subject, on its lowest levels, to the periodical incursions of the river. The “Vates,” versed as they were in all wisdoms, doubtless discovered means by which to preserve themselves from malaria, for this continued to be their sanctuary, if not their home, for many generations. After the Romans had, at the prayer of their stolen Sabine wives, become reconciled with the men of Sabina—and, in true Roman fashion, first given them part in the land and invited them to assist in government, and then taken them on as masters—the great Sabine Judge-King, Numa Pompilius, established himself among the Vatican groves to compile his books of laws. There he wrote, there he died, and there was buried, commanding that his precious volumes should have a separate tomb near his own. “A man’s works live after him;” the site of Numa’s tomb was mere guess-work, his very existence was scoffed at as a myth, by progressive historians, till accident revealed the still intact sepulchre of his cherished writings, precisely on the spot marked by tradition for some twenty-five centuries. The good law-giver was one of the revered realities of my childhood; with sorrow I saw his memory cast away, when I grew up, on the ever-growing scrap-heap of condemned myths, where the iconoclasts of history throw everything that does not fit in to their small neat conceptions; he has come back to me in these later years, and how welcome the towering luminous figure that hovered so protectingly over my early mind pictures of infant Rome! One point in his history always puzzled me, the great distance between his home across the Tiber and the grotto where Egeria, the heavenly nymph, instructed him in wisdom. That lay in a fold of the Cælian Hill, and the entire length of the city has to be traversed to reach it from the Vatican. I used to weave many fairy tales for myself about Egeria when, as children, we were taken to spend the day in the lovely spot then known as her “Grotto,” and so exquisitely described by Byron in “Childe Harold” that there seems nothing left for ordinary mortals to tell about it. But—I will take the risk of appearing presumptuous and say that one factor was wanting to Byron for the task—he was not born a Roman, and his sad childhood, unlike my own, held no memories of paradisial hours of play and dreaming round the hallowed fountain, and in the sacred grove.