It happened that Marius, too, was to take that day's journey on horseback.

Riding presently from the inn, he overtook Cornelius--of the Twelfth Legion--advancing carefully down the steep street; and before they had issued from the gates of Urbs-vetus, the two young men had broken into talk together.

They were passing along the street of the goldsmiths; and Cornelius must needs enter one of the workshops for the repair of some button or link of his knightly trappings.

Standing in the doorway, Marius watched the work, as he had watched the brazier's business a few days before, wondering most at the simplicity of its processes, a simplicity, however, on which only genius in that craft could have lighted .-- By what unguessed-at stroke of hand, for instance, had the grains of precious metal associated themselves [168] with so daintily regular a roughness, over the surface of the little casket yonder?
And the conversation which followed, hence arising, left the two travellers with sufficient interest in each other to insure an easy companionship for the remainder of their journey.

In time to come, Marius was to depend very much on the preferences, the personal judgments, of the comrade who now laid his hand so brotherly on his shoulder, as they left the workshop.
Itineris matutini gratiam capimus,+--observes one of our scholarly travellers; and their road that day lay through a country, well-fitted, by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen a first acquaintance into intimacy; its superficial ugliness throwing the wayfarers back upon each other's entertainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension of which, however, it would relieve, ever and anon, by the unexpected assertion of something singularly attractive.