Shortly after we were brought to the camp, four legions mutinied and demanded that Germanicus lead them back to Rome and dispute the throne with Tiberius, but Germanicus refused. Many of the veterans tried to play upon his sympathies by a display of infirmities of age. I saw one old fellow seize the hand of Germanicus as though to kiss it and then stick the general's fingers in his mouth to feel his toothless gums; another exposed his legs, crippled with rheumatism, while others uncovered their skinny shanks, shriveled from old age. The younger men milled around, blustering and threatening.

Germanicus was a good soul, kindly and generous, but he was never cut out to command Roman legions. As I watched him that day, I could not but visualize what Father would have done under like circumstances; he would have waded in singlehanded with that great sword of his and licked four legions or died in the attempt.

But Germanicus pleaded. He tried to play upon their sympathies. It is hard to believe of one who might have expected someday to be emperor of Rome, but I was there and witnessed it with my own eyes and ears.

"Rather will I die than forget my duty," he cried, and then he drew his sword. "Return to your duties, or I shall plunge this into my heart."

Several soldiers threw their arms about him to prevent this, but others encouraged him contemptuously. "Go to it!" cried several, and one who had been a gladiator drew his own sword and offered it to Germanicus with a sneer. "Take this," he said. "You will find it sharper than your own!"

Seeing that their general was making a damn fool of himself, Caius Caetronius and several other officers surrounded him and hurried him off to his tent.

This was my introduction to the ruling family of Rome and the much vaunted Roman legions. Years of association with them have not tended to improve the opinion I then formed as a little boy of ten; in fact, quite the reverse.

This is not the story of my father, neither is it a history of Rome; but I am constrained to mention a couple of incidents which helped to fix first impressions indelibly in the plastic mind of a boy. Germanicus had met with two serious defeats at the hands of the Germans; and to retrieve lost prestige he undertook another campaign, in fact two of them. In these he lost practically all of a large fleet of ships and fully half of his army; but he took a few poor villages; and, upon the strength of this, pompous boasts of his successes were relayed to Rome.

The Emperor Tiberius, a great general himself, was also a wise old fox. He read between the lines; and to prevent Germanicus from losing the rest of his army, he recalled him to Rome to enjoy his triumph.

For two small boys, the life in a Roman camp close beside a German forest was about as close an approximation of heaven as one may ever expect to attain on earth. It was a mysterious forest, dark and forbidding, in whose depths might lurk sprites and nymphs and demons and strange, wild beasts such as only a boy of ten can conjure irrefutably from the crystal-clear depths of a budding imagination.

I knew our own oak forests of Briton, and I knew the names of the sprites and nymphs and demons who lived in them, though I had seen relatively few of these. But I had seen the great herds of wild swine, the wolves, the bears, and the red deer, and I had known of more than one hunter who had entered these forests and never returned. Yet the forests of Briton seemed friendly, like the fierce face of my father, because I knew them so well; but the German forest was different. However, I did not fear it, being, as I am, the son of my father and the great-grandson of Cingetorix, neither of whom ever knew fear.

Be all that as it may, I did not enter the forest beside which we were camped, because they would not let me. And they would not let me because Little Boots would never let me out of his sight, and, naturally, they would not permit the four-year-old grandnephew of the emperor to expose his divine person to the attention of sprites and nymphs and demons, to say nothing of sundry savage and perpetually ravenous beasts. When I was quite certain that I could not obtain permission to enter the forest, I begged persistently to do so until Agrippina handed me one with the flat of her hand on the side of my head that sent me spinning.