After such hairbreadth escapes there was little need to bemoan a wet coat and an evening under the lee of a heathery scar.
When the morning arrived, clear and bright, as it often does after a storm, I felt in no mood to hang about the locality, but shook the rain from my fleece, and breakfasting on a little water from the brook, a staff in my hand, and my dear-bought wealth in my belt, set out for the unknown town, whose wet roofs shone like molten silver over the dark and dewy oak woods.
Five hours’ tramping brought me there; and truly the city astonished me greatly. Could this, indeed, be Britain, was the constant question on my tongue as I trod fair white streets, with innumerable others opening down from them on either hand, and noticed the evidence of such art and luxury as, hitherto, I had dreamed the exclusive prerogative of the capital of the older empires. Here were baths before which the Roman youth dawdled; stately theaters with endless tiers of seats, from whose rostra degenerate sons of the soil, aping their masters in dress and speech, recited verse and dialogue trimmed to the latest orator in fashion by the Tiber. Mansions and palaces there were, outside which the sleek steeds of Consuls and Prætors champed gilded bits while waiting to carry their owners to gay procession and ceremonial; temples to Apollo, and shrines to Venus, dotted the ways, forums, market places, and the like, in bewildering profusion.
And among all these evidences of the new age thronged a motley mixture of people. The thoughtful senator, coming from conclave, with his toga and parchments, elbowed the callow British rustic in the rude raiment of his fathers. The wild, blue-eyed Welsh Prince, upon his rough mountain pony, would scarce give right of way to the bronzed Roman mercenary from the Rhine: Umbrians and Franks, pale-haired Germans, and olive Tuscans, laughed and chaffered round the booths and fountains, while here and there legionaries stood on guard before great houses, or drank on the tressels of wayside wine-shops. Now and again two or three soldiers came marching down the street with a gang of slaves, or a shock-headed chieftain from the wild north, fierce and sullen, on his way to Rome; and over all the varied throng the crows and kites circled in the blue sky, and the little sparrows perched themselves under the lintel and in the twisted column tops of their mistress’s fane.
Half the day I stared, and then, having eaten some dry Etrurian grapes—the first for four hundred years—I went to the bath and threw down a golden coin in the doorkeeper’s marble slab.
“Why, my son,” said that juvenile official of some trivial fifty summers, “where in the name of Mercury did you pick up this antique thing?” and he handled it curiously. But being in no mind to tell my tale just then, I put him off lightly, and passed on into the great bathing place itself. Stage by stage, “balneum,” “con-camerata,” “sudatio,” “tepidarium,” “frigidarium,” and all their other chambers, I went through, until in the last a mighty slave, who had rubbed me with the strength of Hercules himself for half an hour, suddenly stopped, and, surveying me intently, exclaimed:
“Master! I have scrubbed many a strange thing from many a Roman body, but I will swallow all my own towels if I can get this extraordinary dirt from you,” and he pointed to my bare and glowing chest.
There, to my astonishment, revealed for the first time, was a great serpent-like mark of tattoo and woad circling my body in two wide zones! What it meant, how it came, was past my comprehension. Shrunk and shriveled as I was with long abstemiousness, it seemed but like a gigantic smudge meandering down my person—a smudge, however, that with a little goodly living might stretch out into an elaborate design of some nature. Of course, I knew it was thus the British warriors were accustomed to adorn themselves, but who had been thus purposely decorating one that had never knowingly submitted to the operation, and to what end, was past my guessing.
“Never mind, sir, don’t despond,” said the slave. “We will have another essay.” And hitching me on to the rubbing couch, he knelt upon my stomach—these bath attendants were no more deferential than they are now—and exerted his magnificent strength, armed with the stiffest towel that ever came off a loom, upon me, until I fairly thought that not only would he have the tattoo off, but also all the skin upon which it was engrossed. But it was to no purpose. He rose presently and sulkily declared I had had my money’s worth. “The more he rubbed, the bluer those accursed marks became.” This might well be, so I tossed him an extra coin, and, dressing hastily, covered my uninvited tattoo and went forth, fully determined to examine and read it—for those things were nearly always readable—more closely on a better and more private opportunity.