Standing on the outer rim of the Pincian terrace, watching the primrose die to grey after a sunset in spring, I have gazed over towards St. Peter’s and tried to see the land as it looked to Rome’s builders, the shepherds who fled hither from their ruined homes in the Alban Hills and halted on the southern side of the yellow river, unbridged and unnamed as yet. For it was surely the river that stayed their panic flight only eighteen miles from where the twin volcanoes had vomited fire from the craters that are now the limpid lakes of Nemi and Albano. Though near, the spot seemed safe for the first night. Doubtless they told each other that the next day they would find a ford and travel twice as far again to the low, dark line of the Cimmerian Hills to the northward. But here, at any rate, was herbage and water for the sheep and kine they had saved, and unbroken solitude, where, under the rough skin canopy spread from bough to bough, the women—the few who had found strength to travel—could nurse their babies and sleep for one night unmolested by hostile tribes. So they rested, the younger men keeping watch by the two or three campfires built to scare away the wolves and foxes. And the morning came, a morning of March, with a leap of the sun from behind the Sabine ramparts, and the dew pearled on oak and wild olive branch overhead, on moss and fern beneath, with the little wild almond trees on the slopes across the river snowy with newly burst blossoms, while the first lark soared up towards the sun-shot blue in an ecstasy of song, and the swallows, just back from the shores of Africa, wheeled lower and lower and darted upward again, with angry cries, when they found their last year’s home invaded by men and beasts. They made friends with men’s dwellings later, and, forgetting the crannies of the woodlands, have built in the eaves of palaces for many a century now, but I take it that in swallow sagas those first traditions have been winged down and are still twittered about, with due respect, when the patriarchs hold their sky conclaves in the autumn and the spring, and drill the fledglings for three weeks before the great semestral migration.