Had I been descended from Venus, I should have kept the matter very quiet. She had been a notoriously loose woman, appallingly promiscuous. There was still another and more vital reason why I should never have announced the fact from the housetops: the moral turpitude and mental disorder of the line which was quite apparent even to many of the Julians. Julius Caesar was an epileptic; Agrippina's mother, Julia, was a notorious wanton and adulteress; so was Agrippina's sister, Julia; her brother, Agrippa Posthumus, was a madman; her other brothers, Caius and Lucius, were weak and sickly, dying young, the former insane before his death; and from my earliest experiences of the woman, I felt, even as a small boy, that she was mentally unbalanced: her appalling fits of rage, her total lack of ability to control her temper attested the fact.

This, then, was the Julian line, worshipped as semidivine. The Claudians were only scrofulous.

I have digressed from the story of Little Boots that I might roughly paint in a portion of the backdrop against which his short life was played.

The first night that I spent in the Roman camp, I was sent off to sleep in a tent with other slaves, where I presently heard shrieks and screams coming from the general direction of the tents of Germanicus. They sounded somewhat as if a small child were being burnt at the stake.

"That brat is at it again," grumbled one of the slaves.

"What do you suppose he wants now?"

"Probably the moon."

"Well, that is about the only thing the old shewolf can't get him."

Presently a slave came puffing to our tent. He looked in, and by the light of the small oil lamp that was burning, he finally espied me. "Come with me, slave," he said, although he was a slave himself just putting on airs.

It was not the moon that Little Boots wished: it was I.

Agrippina was furious. "Oh, there you are, you nasty little barbarian; and it's about time. You will sleep there," she pointed at a mattress that had been placed at the foot of Little Boot's cot.

Little Boots stopped screaming and grinned at me. "Hello there, Brit!" he said drowsily and fell asleep. After that, I slept either at the foot of his bed or just outside his door until the day of his death.

Never shall I forget that first night in the Roman camp on the Rhine. In all my ten years I had never seen a village which contained more than a couple of hundred souls, and here I was in a camp laid out with military precision, with streets and row upon row of tents, lighted by flaring torches, and containing fully seventy-five thousand men.

As I lay at the foot of the cot of the little Caesar, my ears wide with wonder, I listened to the night sounds of a Roman camp: the sentries calling the hours; now the neighing of a horse at the picket line, and the thin laughter of women, far away; the attenuated notes of a lute, haunting, provocative, mysterious, coming wanly as though from a great distance, perhaps from the depths of the black and threatening forest my imagination would have it; raucous laughter, oaths, terrific quarreling from the tents of the legionaries; querulous nagging from the tent of Agrippina and Germanicus.

The Romans are not a tall race-my father had towered above them-but their great numbers, their loud boastings, their terrific oaths metamorphosed them into giants in my small mind; and I lay on my mattress and trembled as I thought what my fate might be among them. Of them all, I thought, Agrippina was the most terrible. With far greater equanimity, I could have faced the seventy-five thousand legionaries. I was almost afraid then; but suddenly I recalled that I was the great-grandson of Cingetorix; and I was not afraid, even though I well knew that only the bawling of a small brat stood between me and sudden death. I was wondering if Little Boots would continue to bawl at just the correct psychological moments, when I fell asleep.

My duties consisted in tagging Little Boots around and playing with him. In some ways he seemed much older than he actually was, due, possibly, to the fact that people of this southern clime mature more rapidly than do we Britons, as well as to his exclusively adult companionships.