My next visit was to an Etruscan barber, who was shaving all and sundry under a green-white awning, in a pleasant little piazza. To him I sat, and while he reaped my antique stubble, with many an exclamation of surprise and disgust at its toughness, my thoughts wandered away to the train of remembrances the bath slave’s discovery had started. Again I thought of Blodwen and my little one; the seaport, with its golden beaches, and the quiet pools where the trout and salmon of an evening now and again shattered the crystal mirror of the surface in their sport as she and I sat upon some grassy bank and talked of village statecraft, of conquests over petty princelings, of crops and harvests, of love and war. Then, again, I thought of the Roman galleys, and Cæsar the penman autocrat; of the British camp, and, lastly, the great mischance which had, and yet had not, ended me.
“Ah, that was a bad slash, indeed, sir, wasn’t it?” queried the barber in my ear. “May I ask in what war you took it?”
This very echo of my fancy came so startlingly true, I sprang to my feet and glowered upon him.
“O culler of herbs,” I said, “O trespasser along the verge of mystery and medicine”—pointing to the dried things and electuaries with which, in common then with his kind, his booth was stocked—“where got you the power of reading minds?”
He shook his head vaguely, as though he did not understand, pointing to my neck, and replying he knew naught of what my thoughts might have been, but there, on my shoulder, was obvious evidence of the “slash” he had alluded to.
I took the steel mirror he offered me, and, sure enough, I saw a monstrous white seam upon my tawny skin, healed and well, but very obvious after the bath and shaving.
“Why, sir, I have dressed many a wound in my time, but that must have been about as bad a one as a man could get and live. How did it happen?”
“Oh, I forget just now.”
“Forget! Then you must have a marvelously bad memory. Why, a thing like that one might remember for four hundred years!” said the sagacious little barber, bending his keen eyes on me in a way that was uncomfortable. In fact, he soon made me so ill at ease, being very reluctant that my secret should pass into possession of the town through his garrulous tongue, that I hastily paid him another of those antique green coins of mine, and passed on again down the great wide street.
Even he who lives two thousand years is still the serf of time, therefore I cannot describe all the strange things I saw in that beautiful foreign city set down on the native English land. But presently I tired, and, having become a Roman by exchanging my sheepskins for a fine scarlet toga, over a military cuirass of close-fitting steel, inlaid, after the fashion, with turquoise and gold enamel, sandals upon my feet, and a short sword at my side, I sought somewhere to sleep. First, I chanced upon a little house set back from the main thoroughfare, and over the door a withered bush, and underneath it, on a label, was written thus: