Part 6 (2/2)

The gate was made as strong as possible, of smaller tree trunks lashed together, and strengthened on the inside by crosspieces. When it was closed, two logs, one at the top and one at the bottom, were laid in place across it. Some one was always there to guard it, day and night, and could see through a little window who was coming up the hill.

Although strongholds like this had not been necessary for many years in their old home, there was one, built of stone in the ancient days, and never allowed to go to ruin. It seemed very adventurous to the boys to be erecting defences like that for their own families. But Romulus and Remus had told them that this would be the only way of being quite safe. They had a great deal that petty thieves might want to steal; and the chief Amulius might take it into his head to send a force to attack them, if he knew that so large a party of strangers had come in. When they had been there some years, and more people had joined the colony, the seven hills could be fortified so that n.o.body could take them. Colonus himself could see that, and it gave him a feeling of confidence and respect for his young cousin to know that he had seen it too.

By the time the palisade was finished, not only most of the land within it was clear, but the material for the huts was ready and some huts had been built. The timber was piled as it was cut, by the boys of the various families, on the lots marked out for the houses. The younger children cut reeds and gra.s.s for thatching and for the fodder of the cattle. They did this work in little companies and had a very pleasant time. Sometimes they caught fish, or shot waterfowl with their bows and arrows, or set snares for game.

Later the men would gather stone for a stone wall in place of the palisade, to run along the same line, and then the seasoned timbers of their log wall would still be good for building purposes. There was a steeper and narrower hill near the river which would make an excellent fortress. But the thoughts of the colony now were given to laying out farms.

They cleared and laid out wheat fields and orchards and vineyards as soon as they found land suitable. As any farmer knows, the sooner land is cultivated the more can be got out of it; it is not work that can all be done in a year, or two years, or three. This is especially true of land never used before for anything but pasture, and much of this had never been used even for that. Sheep do not like wet ground, and both sheep and cattle, unless they were tended constantly, might stray into the swampy low grounds. Drainage would help that land; when some of it was drained it would make rich lush meadows and golden grain fields. The land-loving Vitali could see visions of richer crops than any they had ever harvested, growing on that unpromising plain, if only they could have their way with it.

The children who were here, there and everywhere, watching all that was done and helping where they could, felt as if they were looking on at the making of a new world. It was really almost like a miracle-some of the ignorant marsh folk thought it was one-when that uncultivated hilltop, overgrown with bushes and wind-stunted trees and with the rocky bones of it cropping out here and there, became a trim encampment of orderly thatched huts. The beasts grew sleek and fat on the good fodder and grazing, and no one had appeared so far who had any evil designs. In fact, few persons came near them at all. It was as if they had the new world all to themselves.

In the house-building the children helped considerably after the men got the timber frames up. Instead of building stone walls, they were going to do what they had sometimes done before when a wall was run up temporarily,-use mud. They set stakes in rows along the walls, not close together like the palisade, but far enough apart for twigs and branches to be woven in and out between them like a very rough basketry. When this was done the men built a kind of pen on the ground, for a mixing bowl, and brought lime and sand and clay and water, and mixed it with tough gra.s.s into a sort of rough plaster. This was daubed all over the walls with wooden spades until the whole was quite covered, and when it hardened it would be weather-proof and warm. Small houses built in this ”wattle and daub” fas.h.i.+on have been known to last hundreds of years.

The thatched roof was four-sided, running up to a hole in the middle to let out the smoke. When it rained, the rain dripped in around the edges of the hole and ran into a tank under it. The altar with the sacred fire was at one side of this tank, and when the room was dark the flame was reflected in the wavering, s.h.i.+ning depths of the water. The s.p.a.ce opposite the door, beyond the altar, was where the father and mother slept, and later it might be walled off into a private room. Other rooms could be part.i.tioned off along the sides. In later times there was a small entry or vestibule between the door and the inner rooms. But although the other rooms might vary in number and size and use, the _atrium_, the middle s.p.a.ce, in which were the altar and the _impluvium_ or water pool, remained the same. It was the heart of the home. Here the family wors.h.i.+p was held, and this was the common room of the family.

The plan of the encampment itself was like the house on a larger scale.

The huts were built around the inside of the palisade, with a separating s.p.a.ce or belt of land that was never plowed or built on-the _pomerium_, the s.p.a.ce ”before the wall.” In the middle was an open square which was to the town what the _atrium_ was to the house,-the common ground, where public wors.h.i.+p was held, announcements made, and public affairs social or religious carried on. Here was the beehive hut with the sacred fire, and all other temples or public buildings there might be would open on this square. The line of encircling houses made a sort of inner defense line, and even if any stranger could have climbed the wall for purposes of robbery or spying, it would have been hard for him to pa.s.s the houses without being found out.

This was the ancient way in which all the towns of this race were built.

As the towns increased in size, other gates were opened, and streets laid out, but always after the same general plan. And as a family never stayed indoors when it was possible to work or play in the open air, so the colonists did not stay inside their wall when they could go out on the common land and make it fruitful. Their descendants are seldom contented to live inside walls and streets, where they can have no land of their own. They find homes outside, where they can have land to dig up and plant and tend and watch, season after season,-and in the thousands of years since they began to plant and to reap, they have gone almost everywhere in the world.

X

THE KINSMEN

While the colonists were clearing the land on the Square Hill, building huts and laying out farms, they saw nothing of Romulus and Remus. The old shepherd Faustulus came up now and then to look at the work as it went on, and plainly thought these newcomers wonderful and superior beings. But the wolf's foster children were fighters, not husbandmen, and this work was not in their line at all.

The fathers of the colony were not altogether sorry that this was so. They felt that if the hunters, woodsmen, shepherds, soldiers of fortune, and outlawed men Romulus commanded should happen to quarrel with peaceable people like the settlers, it might create a very unpleasant state of things. The brothers themselves were friendly enough, but it was not certain whether they could keep their men from plunder or fighting if they tried. Such bands, so far as Colonus and his friends had known of them, were like a pack of wolves,-the chiefs only held their leaders.h.i.+p by being stronger, fiercer and more determined than the others. Their group of rude huts in the forest was not at all like a civilized town, from what they said of it, and they never seemed to give any attention to the G.o.ds or to wors.h.i.+p. Perhaps they did not know much about such things. Even those who came from civilized places had wandered about so much that they seemed to think one place as good as another. They had no idea of the feeling that made their home, to the colonists, dearer than any other place ever could be. It was so not because it was pleasanter, or because they had more comforts than others, but because it was home, the place where people knew and trusted one another and trusted in the unseen dwellers by the fire to protect and guide them, and to make them wise and just in their dealings with one another.

To the colonists there was a very great difference between the ways of different people. The words they used showed it. Civil life began when men lived in a city, but this was not a large settlement of miscellaneous persons, but a permanent home of men who all wors.h.i.+ped the same G.o.ds, and obeyed the same laws and took responsibility. A man who did his part in the life of such a place was a ”citizen,” and the life itself was ”civilized,” the life of men who served one another and the whole community-men, women and children-looking out for its future as they would for the prosperity of their own family. In fact, such a body of people usually began with a group of relatives, as this one had. Without this dependence on one another to do the right thing, there could not be civilization.

A ”company” was a group who were so far friends as to eat bread together.

This in itself was a proof of a sort of friends.h.i.+p, for in eating a man had to lay down his weapons and be more or less off guard; when men ate together they were all off guard for the time. ”Community” meant a group of families or persons bound together by kindred or friends.h.i.+p or common interest, and stronger for being bound together, as a bundle of sticks is stronger than separate sticks can be. ”Religion” meant something stronger still, the binding together of people who felt the same sort of ties to the unseen world, who wors.h.i.+ped in the same way, and loved the same sweet, old, familiar prayers and chants, and believed in the same unseen rulers of life and death.

The various words for strangers outside these ties which bound them to their own people were just as expressive. Among farmers who lived on cleared land, within walls, the people who did not were ”out of doors,”

the forest people, the ”foreigners.” Among a people who all spoke the same language, the thick-tongued country people, whose ideas were few, like their needs and their occupations, were the ”barbarians,”-the babblers.

And in a place like the settlement they were making now, a little island of orderly, intelligent life in a waste of almost uninhabited wilderness, the scattered hut dwellers were the ”pagans,” the people of the waste. But almost every word that meant a civilized family or town had in it the idea of obligation. People must see that they could not be lawless and have any civil life at all. Civil life meant living together and living more or less by rules that were meant for the comfort and welfare of all.

Now the wild followers of Romulus could surely not be united by any such law as this. They fought as if Mars himself had taught them, the country folk said; but the wors.h.i.+p of this G.o.d of manhood meant a great many things besides fighting. No settlement could be strong where the men were free to fight one another, knew nothing of self-control, made no homes.

Just how much Romulus understood of this, Colonus was not sure. As it proved, he understood a great deal more than any one thought he did.

<script>