By the road, just before the first house, watching five goats, was a boy, a boy with a crooked twitching face.
"'The village idiot,' I put in.

'They can never let him out of sight and he is always beside the road.' "He was not too big an idiot to tell us it was Vediamnum." "He was enough of an idiot," I said, "to forget you, and your question the next minute.

The boy is almost a beast." "He had enough sense to tell us the name of the village," Tanno retorted, "and I had to acknowledge to Dromanus he was right, and so we turned round.

When we were hardly more than out of sight of Vediamnum we met another party, a respectable-looking man, much like a farm bailiff, on horseback, and two slaves afoot.

I had not seen them before, and they, apparently, had not previously seen us.