Here is the NAMASAT of the Volscæ, which became the colony of Nîmes. Side by side, profiles of Augustus and his minister Agrippa. The former, with his hard brow, his flat skull, his grasping, broken nose, inspires me with but little confidence, notwithstanding what gentle Virgil wrote of him: Deus nobis haec otia fecit. It is success that makes gods. Had he not succeeded in his criminal projects, Augustus the divine would have remained Octavius the scoundrel. His minister pleases me better. He was a great shifter of stones, who, with his building operations, his aqueducts, his roads, came to civilize the rustic Volscæ a little. Not far from my village, a splendid road crosses the plain in a straight line, starting from the banks of the Aygues, and climbs up yonder, tedious in its monotonous length, to cross the Sérignan hills, under the protection of a powerful oppidum, which, much later, became the old castle, the Castelas. It is a section of Agrippa’s Road, which joined Marseilles and Vienne. The majestic ribbon, twenty centuries old, is still frequented. We no longer see the little brown foot-soldier of the Roman legions upon it; in his stead, we see the peasant going to market at Orange, with his flock of sheep or his drove of unruly porkers. And I prefer the latter. Let us turn over the green-crusted penny. “COL. NEM.,” [33] colony of Nîmes, the reverse tells us. The inscription is accompanied by a crocodile chained to a palm-tree from which hang crowns. It is an emblem of Egypt, conquered by the veterans who founded the colony. The beast of the Nile gnashes its teeth at the foot of the familiar tree. It speaks to us of Antony, the rip; it tells us of Cleopatra, whose nose, had it been an inch shorter, would have changed the face of the world. Thanks to the memories which it awakens, the scaly-rumped reptile becomes a superb historical lesson. In this way, the great lessons of the numismatical science of metals could follow one another for many a day and be constantly varied without leaving my near neighbourhood. But there is another science of numismatics, far superior and less costly, which, with its medals, the fossils, tells us the history of life. I speak of the numismatics of stones. My very window-ledge, the confidant of bygone ages, talks to me of a vanished world. It is, literally speaking, an ossuary, each particle of which retains the imprint of past lives. That block of stone has lived. Spines of sea-urchins, teeth and vertebræ of fish, broken pieces of shells, shivers of madrepores form a pulp of dead existences. Examined ashlar by ashlar, my house would resolve itself into a reliquary, a rag-fair of things that were alive in the days of old.