armies.  He knew that the end had come.  It is the Barbarians, he thought, who have already conquered the world.  Rome has fallen never to rise again; Rome has shared the fate of Troy and Carthage, of Babylon, and Memphis; Rome is a name in an old wife’s tale; and little savage children shall be given our holy trophies for playthings, and shall use our ruined temples and our overthrown palaces as their playground.  And so sharp was the vividness of his vision that he wondered what would happen to his villa, and whether or no the Barbarians would destroy the image of Ceres on the terrace, which he especially cherished, not for its beauty but because it had belonged to his father and to his grandfather before him.

An eternity seemed to pass, and the tramp, tramp, tramp of the armies of those untrained hordes which were coming from the North and overrunning the world seemed to get nearer and nearer.  He wondered what they would do with him; he had no place for fear in his heart, but he remembered that on the portico in the morning his freedman’s child had been playing with the pieces of a broken jar, a copper coin, and a dog made of terra-cotta.  He remembered the child’s brown eyes and curly hair, its smile, its laughter, and lisping talk—­it was a piece of earth and sun—­and he thought of the spears of the Barbarians, and then shifted his thoughts because they sickened him.

Then, just when he thought the heavy footsteps had reached the approach of his villa, the vision changed.  The noise of tramping ceased, and through the thick darkness there pierced the radiance of the star:  the strange star he had seen that night.  The world seemed to awake from a dark slumber.  The ruins rose from the dust and took once more a stately shape, even lordlier than before.  Rome had risen from the dead, and once more she dominated the world like a starry diadem.  Before him he seemed to see the pillars and the portals of a huge temple, more splendid and gorgeous than the Temples of Caesar.  The gates were wide open, and from within came a blare of trumpets.  He saw a kneeling multitude; and soldiers with shining breastplates, far taller than the legionaries of Caesar, were keeping a way through the dense crowd, while the figure of an aged man—­was it the Pontifex Maximus, he wondered?—­was borne aloft in a chair over their heads.

Then once more the vision changed.  At least the temple seemed to grow wider, higher, and lighter; the crowd vanished; it seemed to him as though a long corridor of light was opening on some ultimate and mysterious doorway.  At last this doorway was opened, and he saw distinctly before him a dark and low manger where oxen and asses were stalled.  It was littered with straw.  He could hear the peaceful beasts munching their food.

In the corner lay a woman, and in her arms was a child and his face shone like the sun and lit up the whole place, in which there were neither torches nor lamps.  The door of the manger was ajar, and through it he saw the sky and the strange star still shining brightly.  He heard a voice, the same voice which he had heard twelve nights before; but the voice was not calling him, it was singing a song, and the song was as it were a part of a larger music, a symphony of clear voices, more joyous and different from anything he had ever heard.