The ceremonies performed on these occasions are thus described. They commenced at midnight. The father of the family would rise at that hour and go out at the door of the house, making certain gesticulations and signals with his hands, which were supposed to have the effect of keeping the specters away. He then washed his hands three times in pure spring water. Then he filled his mouth with a certain kind of black beans for which ghosts were supposed to have some particular fondness. Being thus provided he would walk along, taking the beans out of his mouth as he walked, and throwing them behind him. The specters were supposed to gather up these beans as he threw them down. He must, however, by no means look round to see them. He then, after speaking certain mysterious and cabalistic words, washed his hands again, and then making a frightful noise by striking brass basins together, he shouted out nine times, "Ghosts of this house begone!" This was supposed effectually to drive the specters away--an opinion which was always abundantly confirmed by the fact; for on looking round after this vociferated adjuration, the man always found that the specters were gone! When by these ceremonies, or ceremonies such as these, Romulus had appeased the spirit of his brother, and those of the guardians of his childhood, his mind became more composed, and he turned his attention once more toward the building of the city. The party of Remus now, of course, since it was deprived of its head, no longer maintained itself, but was gradually broken up and merged in the general mass. Romulus became the sole leader of the enterprise, and immediately turned his attention to the measures to be adopted for a more complete and effectual organization of the community over which he found himself presiding. In respect to Remus, it ought perhaps to be added, that after his death a story was circulated in Rome that it was a man named Celer, and not Romulus, that killed him. This story has not, however, been generally believed. It has been thought more probable that Romulus himself, or some of his partisans and friends, invented and circulated the story of Celer, in order to screen him in some degree from the reproach of so unnatural a crime as the killing of a brother so near and dear to him as Remus had been;--a brother who had shared his infancy with him, who had slept with him, at the same time, in the arms of his mother, who had floated with him down the Tiber in the same ark, been saved from death by the same miraculous intervention, and through all the years of infancy, childhood, and youth, had been his constant playmate, companion, and friend. The crime was as much more atrocious than any ordinary fratricide, as Remus had been nearer to Romulus than any ordinary brother. CHAPTER X. ORGANIZATION. B.C. 754