"And not unfrequently stumbled over with the foot," laughed the praetor. "If it had been dark, and if the laborers had been worms, we must have trodden half of them to death--they swarmed so all over the pavement." "What were they doing?" "Every thing," answered Balbilla quickly. "Some were polishing damaged pieces, others were laying new bits of mosaic in the empty places from which it had formerly been removed, and skilled artists were painting colored figures on smooth surfaces of plaster. Every pillar and every statue was built round with a scaffolding reaching to the ceiling on which men were climbing and crowding each other just as the sailors climb into the enemy's ships in the Naumachia." The girl's pretty cheeks had flushed with her eager reminiscence of what she had seen, and, as she spoke, moving her hands with expressive gestures, the tall structure of curls which crowned her small head shook from side to side. "Your description begins to be quite poetical," said the Empress, interrupting her young companion. "Perhaps the Muse may even inspire you with verse." "All the Pierides," said the praetor, "are represented at Lochias. We saw eight of them, but the ninth, that patroness of the arts, who protects the stargazer, the lofty Urania, has at present, in place of a head--allow me to leave it to you to guess divine Sabina?" "Well--what?" "A wisp of straw." "Alas," sighed the Empress. "What do you say, Florus? Are there not among your learned and verse spinning associates certain men who resemble this Urania?" "At any rate," replied Florus, "we are more prudent than the goddess, for we conceal the contents of our heads in the hard nut of the skull, and under a more or less abundant thatch of hair. Urania displays her straw openly." "That almost sounds," said Balbilla laughing and pointing to her abundant locks, "as if I especially needed to conceal what is covered by my hair." "Even the Lesbian swan was called the fair-haired," replied Florus. "And you are our Sappho," said the praetor's wife, drawing the girl's arm to her bosom. "Really! and will you not write in verse all that you have seen to-day?" asked the Empress. Balbilla looked down on the ground a minute and then said brightly: "It might inspire me, everything strange that I meet with prompts me to write verse." "But follow the counsel of Apollonius the philologer," advised Florus. "You are the Sappho of our day, and therefore you should write in the ancient Aeolian dialect and not Attic Greek." Verus laughed, and the Empress, who never was strongly moved to laughter, gave a short sharp giggle, but Balbilla said eagerly: "Do you think that I could not acquire it and do so? To-morrow morning I will begin to practise myself in the old Aeolian forms." "Let it alone," said Domitia Lucilla; "your simplest songs are always the prettiest."