Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/215

 He told her all he knew of the Etruscan nation; all (that all so little) which Pliny and Dionysius and Silius Italicus have told; all the old tales that the Etruscans cherished, and he himself had read in dreamy boyish days of drowsy Mantuan summers—the old, old tales of Ulysses and his son; of the Dioscuri, whose images were engraved on the mirror she used; of Diomedes, snatched to the gods upon the Adrian isle, and his companions changed to birds.

He pictured to her the grand and puissant lucumonies that have perished so utterly off the face of the earth that even their records have perished; he pictured to her the people driving their cattle and carrying their corn to the forests dedicated to Feronia, to exchange them with the Umbrians, the Latins, and the Sabines; the white sacred cattle drawing the brazen ploughshare through the moist green soil, to trace the walls of cities to be; the long, prosperous, ease-loving and luxurious life that was led through so many centuries within those cities' walls when raised, doomed to succumb and change and die out, little by little, when the tramp and the clang of the Legions came over the