The gleaming marble portico of the governor’s residence invites us. Within, the ladies of his household sew and spin, while their lord directs the affairs of his town and sits on the judgment seat. On their dressing-tables are mirrors of polished steel, combs of boxwood, and pins of bone for their long tresses. They gird up their robes with brooches of gold and silver; they wear jewelled bracelets on their arms and dainty shoes of silk on their feet. Supper is at three. Then the gentlemen will join them, and they will recline on the couches and feast on the dainties of the island, which they will wash down with a favourite wine trodden out in the presses of the distant home-land. Then we pass on to the “poor quarter,” where the workshops of the multifarious workers are situated and the huts of the humblest part of the population abound. Here there are squalor and misery in plenty, but still a touch of Roman manners. Such is the life of a Brito-Roman town in the palmy days of the Romans in Britain. And now let the pageant move on to the closing scenes of Roman sway. Rome is sinking fast. Within, her citizens have lost their old courage and genius for government. Without, the fierce Goths and Vandals are assailing her provinces. Rome’s grip on her Empire is being loosened more and more every day, and the wild hordes on her frontiers grow bolder and bolder as the Roman garrisons are withdrawn to defend the great city itself. So it is in Britain, where the Caledonians swarm over Hadrian’s Wall and fall upon the Britons of the south. The Roman troops mutiny, and set up their general as emperor, and even follow him to Gaul, where stout-hearted Severus, who now appears on the scene, makes short work of them and their leader. Meanwhile the ravages of the Caledonians increase, and to save the province old Severus, now sixty-two years of age and racked with the gout, crosses the Channel, and, carried in a litter before his army, sets his face for the border, in the hope of teaching the northern tribes a terrible lesson. Through the trackless swamps, the woods, the moorlands, and the wild mountains beyond the Wall, the old general hews his way until he reaches the shores of the Moray Firth, where the tribes make peace. Severus has accomplished nothing. His victory is a disaster; a few more such victories and he will have no army left. When the watchers on the Wall greet his approach with shouts of welcome, the bleaching bones of fifty thousand Romans mark his long line of march. He repairs the Wall, and then, grievously sick, retreats to York, where, on his deathbed, he plans a new campaign which will never be made.