Holy wells too were common, which were honoured with models of the limbs their waters healed, and other curious gifts, thrown into them--as they are still in every part of the Old World. Horace's fount of Bandusia is the most famous of these in literature.[41] It was an old usage to throw garlands into springs and to crown wells on October 13th.[42] Streams and {14} wells alike were haunted by mysterious powers, too often malevolent.[43] Ovid describes old charms to keep off vampires, _striges_, from the cradles of children.[44] In fact the whole of Nature teemed with beings whom we find it hard to name. They were not pleasant enough, and did not appeal enough to the fancy, to merit the name "fairies"--at least since _The Midsummer Night's Dream_ was written. Perhaps they are nearer "The little People"--the nameless "thim ones."[45] They were neither gods nor demons in our sense of the words, though Greek thinkers used the old Homeric word _daimon_ to describe them or the diminutive of it, which allowed them to suppose that Socrates' _daimonion_ was something of the kind. [Sidenote: The genius] But these Nature-spirits, whatever we may call them, were far from being the only superhuman beings that encompassed man. Every house had its _Lares_ in a little shrine (_lararium_) on the hearth, little twin guardian gods with a dog at their feet, who watched over the family, and to whom something was given at every meal, and garlands on great days. Legend said that Servius Tullius was the son of the family _Lar_.[46] The _Lares_ may have been spirits of ancestors. The Emperor Alexander Severus set images of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham and Orpheus, "and others of that sort" in his _lararium_.[47] Not only houses but streets and cross-roads had _Lares_; the city had a thousand, Ovid said, besides the _genius_ of the Prince who gave them;[48] for Augustus restored two yearly festivals in their honour in Spring and Autumn. There were also the _Penates_ in every home, whom it would perhaps be hard to distinguish very clearly from the _Lares_. Horace has a graceful ode to "Phidyle" on the sufficiency of the simplest sacrifices to these little gods of home and hearth.[49] The worship of these family gods was almost the only {15} part of Roman religion that was not flooded and obscured by the inrush of Oriental cults. "The Ancients," said Servius, "used the name _Genius_ for the natural god of each individual place or thing or man,"[50] and another antiquary thought that the _genius_ and the _Lar_ might be the same thing. For some reason men of letters laid hold upon the _genius_, and we find it everywhere. Why there should be such difference even between twin brothers, _He_ only knows whose influence at our birth O'errules each mortal's planet upon earth, The attendant genius, temper-moulding pow'r, That stamps the colour of man's natal hour.[51]