Six months ago he had been a student at Athens, wandering with his friends along the trickling Cephissus, or climbing, in holiday sport, the marble cone of Hymettus.

And now--he was a proscribed rebel! Enemies thirsted for his blood! He was riding beside a man who made no disclaimer of his intention to subvert the constitution! If Caesar failed, he, Drusus, would share in "that bad eminence" awarded by fame to the execrated Catilinarians.

Was it--was it not all a dream?
Connected thought became impossible.

Now he was in the dear old orchard at Praeneste playing _micare_[156] with Cornelia and AEmilia; now back in Athens, now in Rome.

Poetry, prose, scraps of oratory, philosophy, and rules of rhetoric,--Latin and Greek inextricably intermixed,--ideas without the least possible connection, raced through his head.