"Just now, mother, you waked me from a frightful dream. I thought that the man who has our father's estates was dead; but he came from the dead, and was trying to kill Paulus, my brother there; and for that purpose was striving to wrest the sword from Paulus's hand; and that the man, or _lar_, laughed in a hideous manner, and cried out, 'It is with his own sword we will slay him! Nothing but his own sword!'" The old freedman turned pale, and muttered something to himself, as he stood by the side of the vehicle; and while he kept the horses steady, with the long reins in his left hand, glanced awfully toward Paulus. "Brother," continued the child, "I forget that man's name. What _is_ the name?" "Never mind the name now," said Paulus; "a dead person cannot kill a living one; and that man is not in Italy who will kill me with my own sword, if I be not asleep. Look at the beautiful land! See, as Philip tells you, the beautiful land where you are going to be so happy." The river Liris, now the Garigliano, flowed all gold in the western sun; some dozen of meadows behind them, between rows of linden-trees, oleanders, and pomegranates, with laurel, bay, and long bamboo-like reeds of the _arundo donax_, varying the rich beauty of its banks: "_Daphrones, platanones, et aëriæ cyparissi._" A thin and irregular forest of great contemplative trees; flowerless and sad beech, cornel, alder, ash, hornbeam, and yew towered over savannahs of scented herbs, and glades of many-tinted grasses. Some clumps of chestnut-trees, hereafter to spread into forests, but then rare, and cultivated as we cultivate oranges and citrons, stood proudly apart. A vegetation, which has partly vanished, gave its own physical aspect to an Italy the social conditions of which have vanished altogether; and were even then passing, and about to pass, through their last appearances. But much also that we in our days have seen, both there and elsewhere, was there then. The flower or blossom of the pomegranate lifted its scarlet light amidst vines and olives; miles of oleander trees waved their masses of flame under the tender green filigree of almond groves, and seemed to laugh in scorn at the mourning groups of yew, and the bowed head of the dark, widow-like, and inconsolable cypress. All over the leaves of the woods autumn had strewn its innumerable hues. In the west, the sky was hung with those glories which no painter ever reproduced and no poet ever sang; it was one of the sunsets which make all persons of sensibility who contemplate them dumb, by making all that can be said of them worse than useless. A magnificent and enormous villa, or _castellum_, or country mansion--palace it seemed--showed parts of its walls, glass windows, and Ionic columns, through the woods on the banks of the Liris; and upon the roof of this palace a great company of gilt, tinted, and white statues, much larger than life, in various groups and attitudes, as they conversed, lifted their arms, knelt, prayed,