“And if _he_ gets the opportunity first?” asked the slave, interested in spite of himself at the enthusiasm which carried him irresistibly along with it. “If your guard is an inch too high, your return a thought too slow? If you go backwards on the sand, with the hilt at your breastbone, and the two feet of steel in your bosom? How does it feel then?”
“Faith, lad, you must cross the Styx to have that question fairly answered,” replied the other. “I have had no such experience yet. When it comes I shall know how to meet it. But this talking makes a man thirsty, and the sun is hot enough to bake a negro here. Come with me, lad! I know a shady nook, where we can pierce a skin of wine, and afterwards play a game at quoits, or have a bout of wrestling, to while away the afternoon.”
The slave was nothing loth. Besides the debt of gratitude he owed for preservation from a serious danger, there was something in his new friend’s rough, good‐humoured, and athletic manhood that won on the Briton’s favour. Hirpinus, with even more than their fierce courage, had less than the usual brutality of his class, and possessed besides a sort of quaint and careless good‐humour, by no means rare among the athletes of every time, which found its way at once to the natural sympathies of the slave. They started off accordingly, on the most amicable terms, in search of that refreshment which a few hours’ exposure to an Italian sun rendered very desirable; but the crowd had not yet cleared off, and their progress was necessarily somewhat slow, notwithstanding that the throng of passengers gave way readily enough before two such stalwart and athletic forms.
Hirpinus thought it incumbent on him to take the Briton, as it were, under his protection, and to point out to him the different objects of interest, and the important personages, to be seen at that hour in the streets of the capital, totally irrespective of the fact that his pupil was as well instructed on these points as himself. But the gladiator dearly loved a listener, and, truth to tell, was extremely diffuse in his narratives when he had got one to his mind. These generally turned on his own physical prowess, and his deadly exploits in the amphitheatre, which he was by no means disposed to underrate. There are some really brave men who are also boasters, and Hirpinus was one of them.