As he spoke, a strange movement occurred. The general or _legatus_ dismounted, and, giving the bridle of his horse to a soldier, began to walk slowly up and down the side of the road. No sooner had his foot touched the ground than the whole of the Numidian squadron seemed to rise like a covey out of a stubble field; with little clang of arms, but with one short, sharp cry, or whoop, it burst from the high road into the meadow land. There the evolutions which they performed seemed at first to be all confusion, only for the fact that, although the horsemen had the air of riding capriciously in every direction, crossing, intermingling, separating, galloping upon opposite curves, and tracing every figure which the whim and fancy of each might dictate, yet no two of them ever came into collision. Indeed, fantastic and wild as that rhapsody of manœuvres into which they had broken appeared to be, some principle which was thoroughly understood by every one of them governed their mazy gallop. It was as accurate and exact as some stately dance of slaves at the imperial court. It was, in short, itself a wild dance of the Numidian cavalry, in which their reinless horses, guided only by the flashing blades and the voices of their riders, manifested the most vehement spirit and a sort of sympathetic frenzy. These steeds, which never knew the bridle, and went thus mouth-free even into battle--these horses, which their masters turned loose at night into the fields, and which came back bounding and neighing at the first call, were now madly plunging, wheeling, racing, and charging, like gigantic dogs at sport. Presently they began to play a strange species of leap-frog. A Numidian boy, who carried a trumpet and rode a pony, or at least a horse smaller and lower than the rest of the barbs, ("Berber horses,") suddenly halted upon the outside of the mad cavalry whirlpool which had been formed, and flung himself flat at full length upon the back of the diminutive animal. Instantly the whirl, as it circled toward him, straightened itself into a column, and every horseman rode full upon the stationary pony, and cleared both steed and rider at a bound, a torrent of cavalry rushing over the obstruction with wild shouts. "That is Numidian sport, Master Paulus," said the freedman; "but there is not a rider among them to be compared to yourself." "Certainly I can ride," said the youth; "but I pretend not to be superior to these Centaurs." "Be these, then, the Centaurs I have heard of?" asked Agatha; "be these the wild powers?"