I do not think it necessary to describe in detail my marriage to Vedia, nor our dinners at Nemestronia's, at Tanno's, at Segontius Almo's; nor the dinners we gave at my old home, after it had been fitted up to our liking, all trace of its occupancy by tenants effaced and we had settled there.

Why tell at length of my manumission of Agathemer, of my endowment of him with a goodly share of my heritage from poor Falco, or of his disposition of Falco's gems and his rapid acquisition of vast wealth and of his continued prosperity?

When my misfortunes began Nemestronia was past her eighty-fourth birthday. After my rehabilitation Vedia and I helped at the celebration of her ninety-fifth, and of three more.

Nemestronia lived almost to her hundredth birthday, in full possession of her faculties and, until near the end, in marvellously good health. She is still remembered as having been the oldest noble matron ever known in Rome.

Like her, Chryseros Philargyrus, though long past the usual term of human life when my disasters overtook us, survived my nine winters of adventures and lived to greet me as a son rearisen from the dead, in the tenth summer after he had sped me on my way in the midnight woods from Ducconius Furfur's land.

Enough to say that Vedia and I, from a second-floor balcony, watched pass
the triumphal procession of our great Prince of the Republic, Septimius
Severus, when he returned victorious over both his rivals and reËntered
Rome, indubitably master of the world.

As to my later life I cannot forbear remarking that I am the only man with pierced ears who ever mingled as an equal with the bathers in the Baths of Titus, the only man, certainly, with a brand mark on his shoulder and scourge-scars on his back who ever habitually frequented that most magnificent of our fashionable pleasure-resorts. My brand-marks and scourge-scars have not diminished my enjoyment of life except that they frequently give bores a pretext for insisting on my narrating my adventures.

Of course, as in my city mansion, so also at Villa Andivia, I have had constructed and consecrated a handsome private chapel to Mercury.