Ruins of Italica 



between the acts and smoked their cigarillos (or did what- 

 ever in those days corresponded with this modern delasse- 

 ment)j while the last wounded gladiator was dying behind 

 the scenes, and made their bets while the next pair were 

 buckling on their armour. The broken terraces of stone 

 seats remain, but the grass grows green, for the benefit of a 

 few scrambling goats, in the arena. 



It is natural to fill up the blank gap which time has made 

 with imagination's reproduction of the gaiety, eagerness, 

 and agony of victims who bled, and crowds who shouted, 

 where now reign the silence, and solitude, and ruin of near 

 two thousand years. But what prevented my indulging 

 very long in these musings on the past was, that I began to 

 be very hungry for my breakfast ; so scrambling out of the 

 city founded by Scipio, and the birth-place of Trajan, I 

 returned to the road, and, following it still to the north- 

 ward, came before long to a small venta^ with a broad shed 

 of thatch, supported on posts in front of it. 



Here I found a woman sitting over an earthenware copa 

 of charcoal, and asked for breakfast. She set bread and 

 wine, and a great pie-dish full of large salted sardines, before 

 me. Cold fish is a favourite food of the poor people here, 

 and with excellent bread (which you get everywhere in 

 Spain I believe, but especially in the neighbourhood of 

 Seville), a icw olives, and a jar of decent manzanilla^ my 

 cold sardines were by no means a contemptible breakfast, 

 for which I paid five-pence. 



While I was eating, a soldier came in, and I had a sort 

 of vague impression that this road-guard would find me in 

 the wrong some way, and take me up. He turned out a 

 good-humoured fellow, coming, not on a domiciliary visit, but 

 with the same object as myself, — to get his breakfast. He 

 and the landlady had a considerable gossip, of which I, being 



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