This excellent and celebrated house of entertainment for belated or way-worn travellers, as well as for all who desired a change from the monotony of their usual life, was kept by a remarkably worthy old couple, formerly slaves, a freedman and freedwoman of the illustrious Æmilian family. The reader will have noticed that the youth whom it is necessary, we suppose, to acknowledge in the capacity of our hero, has been called Paulus Æmilius Lepidus; that his father had borne the same style; and likewise that his father's brother, the former sovereign magistrate or triumvir in the second and great triumvirate, was named Marcus Æmilius Lepidus. In all these names, that of Æmilius occurs; and Æmilius was the noblest of the patronymics which once this great family boasted. Now, theirs had been the house in which Crispus and Crispina, the good innkeeper and his wife, at present free and prosperous, had been boy and girl slaves. The wife, indeed, had been nurse to a son of Marcus Lepidus, the triumvir. That son, some years before the date of our narrative, had been engaged in a conspiracy against Augustus; and the conspiracy having been discovered by Mæcenas, the youth had been put to death. Marcus Æmilius Lepidus, the father, was exculpated from all knowledge of this attempt on the part of his son, but had ever since lived in profound retirement at a lonely sea-shore castle some twenty or thirty miles from Crispus's inn, near Monte Circello; a silent, brooding, timid man, no longer very wealthy, entirely without weight in the society which he had abandoned, and without any visible influence in the political world, from which he had fled in some terror and immense disgust. As Sejanus rode slowly up to the inn-door, a centurion came out of the porch with the air of one who had been waiting for him. Saluting the general, this officer said that he had been left behind by Velleius Paterculus to say that the sister of the youth whom Tiberius had placed under the charge of Paterculus had fainted on the road; that being unable to proceed, she and her mother had taken a lodging in the inn; that the youth had at once begged Paterculus to allow him to remain instead of proceeding to Formiæ, in order that he might attend to his poor sister, for whose life he was alarmed, giving his promise that he would faithfully report himself, and not attempt to escape; that Paterculus considered himself justified, under the circumstances, in acceding to so natural a request; consequently, that the young man was now in the inn, along with his mother and sister; and that he, the centurion, had been ordered to await Sejanus's arrival, and inform him of what had occurred, so that he might either confirm his subordinate's decision, or repair the mistake, if it was one, and cause the youth to go forward at once to Formiæ according to the letter of Tiberius's original command.