Ch. 12 - The Passage of the Wall

'A fair night this, Balbus! All moonlight and no mist! I was posted
last evening at the Ostian Gate, and was half choked by the fog.'

'If you were posted last night at the Ostian Gate, you were better
placed than you are now. The ramparts here are as lonely as a ruin in
the provinces. Nothing behind us but the back of the Pincian Mount;
nothing before us but the empty suburbs; nothing at each side of us but
brick and stone; nothing at our posts but ourselves. May I be crucified
like St. Peter, if I believe that there is another place on the whole
round of the walls possessed of such solitary dulness as this!'

'You are a man to find something to complain of, if you were lodged in
one of the palaces yonder. The place is solitary enough, it is true;
but whether it is dull or not depends on ourselves, its most honourable
occupants. I, for one, am determined to promote its joviality by the
very praiseworthy exertion of obliging you, my discontented friend, with
an inexhaustible series of those stories for which, I may say, without
arrogance, I am celebrated throughout the length and breadth of all the
barracks of Rome.'

'You may tell as many stories as you please, but do not imagine that I
will make one of your audience.'

'You are welcome to attend to me or not, as you choose. Though you do
not listen, I shall still relate my stories by way of practice. I will
address them to the walls, or to the air, or to the defunct gods and
goddesses of antiquity, should they happen at this moment to be hovering
over the city in a rage, as some of the unconverted would have us
believe; or to our neighbours the Goths, if they are seized with a
sudden desire to quite their encampments, and obtain a near view of the
fortifications that they are so discreetly unwilling to assault. Or,
these materials for a fit and decent auditory failing me, I will tell my
stories to the most attentive of all listeners--myself.'

And the sentinel, without further delay, opened his budget of anecdotes,
with the easy fluency of of a man who possessed a well-placed confidence
in the perfection of his capacities for narration. Determined that his
saturnine colleague should hear him, though he would not give him his
attention, he talked in a raised voice, pacing briskly backwards and
forwards over the space of his allotted limits, and laughing with
ludicrous regularity and complacency at every jest that he happened to
make in the course of his ill-rewarded narrative. He little thought, as
he continued to proceed in his tale that its commencement had been
welcomed by an unseen hearer, with emotions widely different from those
which had dictated the observations of the unfriendly companion of his
watch.

True to his