Near the yellow river, there was a group of seven irregular hills which had never been inhabited, because the place was far from any town, and the neighboring chiefs had no especial use for it. There was good water on these hills and pasture enough for all the herds, if the woods were cleared off. The hills were so shaped that they could be defended, and from those heights they could see for miles and miles across the plain. The wild face of Romulus changed and [pg 107]kindled as he talked, and Marcus Colonus saw that here in this youth, his kinsman, in spite of his adventurous and untrained life and his ignorance of the old and time-honored ways, he had found a true son of the Vitali, who loved his land and his people.
The colonists crossed the plain to the seven hills, with the brothers guiding them, and on the largest, which stood perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the river, they made their camp and set up the beehive temple for the last time. Here, they hoped, the sacred fire would burn year after year, and their people find a home.
IX
THE SQUARE HILL
The colony had chosen for their home one of the largest of the seven hills, squarish in form and more or less covered with woodland. They began at once to fence it around, to keep their beasts from wandering out and thieves and wild beasts from getting in, for all this country was very lonely. They had done this sort of thing so often since they left their old home that they did it quickly and rather easily. It was the habit of their people to save time and strength wherever they could, without being any less thorough. To do a thing right, in the beginning, saved a great deal of loss and trouble in the end.
While some cut down trees that grew on the land where they intended to make their permanent settlement, others trimmed off the branches as fast as the trees were down, and cut the logs to about the same length, and pointed the ends. The boys gathered up the branches and cut firewood from them. The brush that was not needed [pg 109]for the fires was made into loose fagots and piled up on the logs, as they were laid along the line where the wall was to be. This made a kind of brush fence, not of much use against a determined enemy but better than none at all. Even this would keep an animal from bouncing into the camp without being heard, and in fact most wild beasts are rather suspicious of anything that looks like a trap.
When they had logs enough to begin fencing, all placed ready for use, they dug holes along the line they had marked out with a furrow, and planted the logs side by side as closely as they could, like large stakes. In any newly settled place, where trees are plenty, this is the most easily built fortification settlers can have, and the strongest. A stone or earth wall takes much longer to build. It is still called a palisade, a wall of stakes,—just as it was by men who built so, thousands of years ago and called a sharpened stake a “palum.” A fence built of boards set up in this way is called a paling fence, and the boards are called palings. The word fence itself is only a short word for “defence,”—a defence made of pointed stakes planted in the ground.
The earth that was dug up was always thrown inside and formed the basis of a low earthwork [pg 110]that made the palisade firmer. It was made as high as possible from the outer side by being built on the edge of the hilltop so that the ground sloped away sharply from it. The pointed tops of the logs were a foot or two too high for a man to grasp at them and climb up, but from the inside the defenders could mount the earthwork and look through high loopholes.