Valeria

As they drew nearer the gates of the city, it became difficult to thread their way through the throngs of eager travellers--gay lecticæ or silken-curtained carriages and flashing chariots, conveying fashionable ladies and the gilded gallants of the city to the elegant villas without the walls--processions of consuls and proconsuls with their guards, and crowds of peasants bringing in the panniers of their patient donkeys fruits, vegetables, and even snow from the distant Soracte, protected from the heat by a straw matting--just as they do in Italy to-day. The busy scene is vividly described in the graphic lines of M