A feeble attempt was made to bolt the doors against Sulla and his soldiers, but it was impossible to bar their entrance. As they marched through the streets, they were assailed from the houses with showers of brick, which, though very destructive, could not have been so damaging as the modern mortar. Some of the inhabitants were armed with slings, and now and then an arrow was discharged from a bow window. Orders were immediately given to set fire to the quarters whence the annoyance proceeded, and the directions were acted upon with that indiscriminate ferocity which is too often displayed by an incensed soldiery against an unarmed populace. The anger excited by the few was vented on the unoffending many, and the troops performed, with savage alacrity, the most humiliating service on which they could have been employed--the butchery of their defenceless fellow-citizens. [Illustration: "Who dares kill Marius?"] The leaders, or, rather, the mis-leaders of the people in this miserable conspiracy, were the first to seek their own safety in flight, and the tribune P. Sulpicius, who had set the example of employing brute force, evinced the most cowardly haste in running away from it, when he seemed likely to become one of its victims. Marius made for the marshes near Minturnæ, where he stuck in the mud, and covered his reputation with a number of stains that are quite indelible. On being discovered in his ignoble retreat, by those who had pursued him through thick and thin, he was dragged to the town and lodged in the nearest station. A price had been put upon his head, but the article does not seem to have been worth much, for he had shown very little sense in the part he had been playing. His gray hairs, or, perhaps, rather, his total baldness, still commanded so much of sympathy, that nobody evinced a disposition to become his executioner, until a Cimbric soldier undertook the discreditable office. He approached the veteran with a drawn sword, but Marius had got into a dark corner, and succeeded in frightening the man-at-arms by putting on a voice of the most dismal character. The soldier fancying himself in the presence of a ghost, failed in plucking up a sufficient spirit; and when a moan was heard--inquiring, "Who dares kill Caius Marius?" the would-be assassin, having flung down his sword, ran away, exclaiming--"Not I, for one, at any rate!" The soldier, of course, exaggerated the cause of his fears, and declared that the eyes of Marius had appeared to him like two candles burning in their sockets. The inhabitants of Minturnæ became as nervous as the panic-stricken soldier, and put Marius on board a ship, which, after being tossed about for several days, came to an anchor, or ran aground, high and dry, on the fine old crusted port of Carthage. Here he rambled about the ruins, and rested his aching head upon its broken temples. The Roman Governor, Sextilius, not knowing what to do with such an embarrassing visitor,