“And do you wish to go home, my daughter?” asked the priest.
“I will go home,” she said, “with my husband.”
And the news ran through the camps that Romulus had taken a Sabine bride.
In the customs of the people who founded the town by the river, there was no act of life which did not have some ancient rule or tradition connected with it. There was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. In all the important work of life, such as the care of the sheep and cattle, the sowing of the fields and the making of wine, certain elders among the men were chosen to take charge of the management, decide on what day the work was to commence and take care that all was done as it ought to be. In this new life in a strange place the colonists found that some kinds of work that used not to be very important became so because things were changed. This was the case with the priest who had charge of the public ways,—the gates, the roads and the walls. In their old home this was not a very important office, because the walls almost never needed anything done to them, and the roads were all made long ago. Tertius Calvo, who was the pontifex or roadmaker, was a quiet man and never had much to say, but in this place he had more to do than almost any other public officer in the city.
Calvo was a good mason and understood something of what we should call now civil engineering. He had judgment about the best place to lay out a road and the proper stone to choose for masonry. As the town grew, and the farming lands about it were cleared, and more and more persons became interested in the town by the river, Calvo, in his quiet way, was one of the busiest of men.
He got on very well with the miscellaneous laboring force that he could command, and partly by signs, partly in a mixture of the two languages, he learned to talk with the stonemason Canial quite comfortably. Gradually, as they were needed, roads were made in different directions over the plain, and always in much the same way. They were as straight as they could be without taking altogether more time and labor than could be given, and they were usually carried across streams and bogs instead of going around. Calvo enjoyed working out ways to do this. If the plain had been really boggy he might not have been able to do as much as he did, but it was not really a marsh. It was a more or less level area lying so little above the bed of the river that the rise of a foot or two in the waters changed its aspect until the Romans began draining it. The people were astonished to see how much more quickly they could reach the river over one of Calvo’s roads than they could over the old, winding, up-and-down paths. The road was built with a track in the middle higher than the edges, to let the water drain off, and this track was more solid than the edges and far more solid usually than the land on each side the road. There was no need for the highway to be very wide, for most of the travel was on foot. After a time people began to call the new roads the “laid” roads, because they were made by laying, or spreading, new material on the line of travel.