The young girl was at once startled from the sense of sickness and grief, and gazed with big eyes at the pageant. Six hundred yards further on a trumpet-note, clear and long, gave some sudden signal, and the whole body instantly halted. From a detached group in the rear an officer now rode toward the front; a loud word or two of command was heard, a slight movement followed, and then, as if the column were some monstrous yellow-scaled serpent with an elastic neck and a black head, the swarthy troops which had led the advance wheeled slowly backward, two instead of five abreast, while the main column simultaneously stretched itself forward on a narrower face, and with a deeper file, occupying thus less than half the width of the road, which they had before nearly filled, and extending much further onward. Meantime the squadrons which had led it continued to defile to the rear; and when their last rank had passed the last of those fronting in the opposite direction, they suddenly faced to their own right, and, standing like statues, lined the way on the side opposite to that where our travellers were reposing, but some forty or fifty yards higher up the road, or more north. In front of the line of horsemen, who, after wheeling back, had been thus faced to their own right, or the proper left of the line of march, was now collected a small group of mounted officers. One of them wore a steel corselet, a casque of the same metal, with a few short black feathers in its crest, and the _chlamys_, or a better sort of _sagum_, the scarlet mantle of a military tribune, over a black tunic, upon which two broad red stripes or ribbons were diagonally sewn. This costume denoted him one of the _Laticlavii_, or broad-ribboned tribunes; in other words--although, to judge by the massive gold ring which glittered on the forefinger of his bridle hand, he might have been originally and personally only a knight--he had received either from the emperor, or from one of the two Cæsars then governing with and under Augustus, the senatorial rank.