And with the words, he advanced to the Moors who stood beside the well-like aperture, and without a word suffered them to place the rope under his arms, and lower him into the pit. Just as his head, however, was disappearing, he cast his eyes upward, and met the earnest gaze of the Consul. "The voice of the people! the man of the people!" he cried sarcastically. "Fool! fool! _they_ shall avenge me! Think upon me near Formiæ!" Was that spite, or a prophecy? The eyes of the dying sometimes look far into futurity. The haughty traitor was beyond the sight, before his words had ceased to ring in the ears of the spectators. There was a small low sound heard from below—not a groan, not a struggle—but a rustle, a sob, a flutter—silence. ’So did(12) that Patrician, of the most noble house of the Cornelii, who once held consular dominion in Rome, meet his end, merited by his course of life, and his overt actions.’ Cethegus perished senseless, half dead by his own deed. Cæparius died sullen; Gabinius weak and almost fainting; Statilius struggling and howling. All by a hard and slavish death, strangled by the base noose of a foreign hangman. An hour afterward, their corpses were hurled down the Gemonian Stairs, among the shouts and acclamations of the drunken slavish rabble. An hour afterward, Cicero stood on the rostrum, near the Libonian well—that rostrum whereon, at a later day Lentulus’ prophecy was fulfilled—and called out, in a voice as solemn and almost as deep as thunder, "THEY WERE!" And the voice of the people yelled out its joy, because they _were_ no longer; and hailed their slayer the Savior and Father of his country. A few years afterward, how did they not hail Anthony? CHAPTER XV. THE CAMP IN THE APPENNINES. With that he gave his able horse the head. HENRY IV. There is a wild gorge in the very summit of the Appennines, not quite midway between Florence and Pistoia, the waters of which, shed in different directions, flow on the one hand tributaries to the Po, and on the other to the Arno, swelling the Adriatic, and the Mediterranean seas. The mountains rise abruptly in bare crags, covered here and there by a low growth of myrtle and wild olives, on either hand this gorge, quite inaccessible to any large array of armed men, though capable of being traversed by solitary foresters or shepherds. Below, the hills fall downward in a succession of vast broken ridges, in places rocky and almost perpendicular, in places swelling into rounded knolls, feathered with dark rich forests of holm oak and chesnut. In the highest part of this gorge, where it spreads out into a little plain, perched like the eyry of some ravenous bird of prey, the camp of Catiline was pitched, on the second evening after the execution of his comrades.