The great Apuleius, the literary ideal of his boyhood, had arrived in Rome,--was now visiting Tusculum, at the house of their common friend, a certain aristocratic poet who loved every sort of superiorities; and Marius was favoured with an invitation to a supper given in his honour.
It was with a feeling of half-humorous concession to his own early boyish hero-worship, yet with some sense of superiority in himself, seeing his old curiosity grown now almost to indifference when on the point of satisfaction at last, and upon a juster estimate of its object, that he mounted to the little town on the hillside, the foot-ways of which were so many flights of easy-going steps gathered round a single great house under shadow of the "haunted" ruins of Cicero's villa on the wooded heights.

He found a touch of weirdness in the circumstance that in so romantic a place he had been bidden to meet the writer who was come to seem almost like one of the personages in his own fiction.

As he turned now and then to gaze at the evening scene through the tall narrow openings of the street, up which the cattle were going home slowly from the [77] pastures below, the Alban mountains, stretched between the great walls of the ancient houses, seemed close at hand--a screen of vaporous dun purple against the setting sun--with those waves of surpassing softness in the boundary lines which indicate volcanic formation.

The coolness of the little brown market-place, for profit of which even the working-people, in long file through the olive-gardens, were leaving the plain for the night, was grateful, after the heats of Rome.

Those wild country figures, clad in every kind of fantastic patchwork, stained by wind and weather fortunately enough for the eye, under that significant light inclined him to poetry.