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any, and he says: “You get to hell out of here up on to them ramparts—that’s your home from home. Now shift!”
    â€˜Then I had another look around. Golly, but I got some shock. Them ruins had clean vanished and Carthage stood there just as it did before the flood. Villas, temples, public squares, and the whole caboodle—but my immediate attention was centred on that brass-clad stiff.
    â€˜Just batty with rage, he was. He up with a horrid-looking cat-o’-nine-tails and lammed me over the shoulders with it, like Babe Ruth hits the ball—Jiminy, but it made me hop. It was just about then that I tumbled to it—that I’d lost my pants. Instead I was all swell and dandy in a little cotton frock—just like a Sunday school kid. Sure—you can laugh, all right—I laughed a bit myself at first, but not for long— no, Sirr. It dawned on me that Old King Cole in the tin rigout was a Carthaginian Cen-too-rion, and I was a Sammy in his little bunch. Crikey! I can feel that cat-o’-nine tails now. He ran me back to those ramparts, laying on like hell all the time, and cussing me for bein’ fresh with him—me, a Barbarian mercenary. Yep! that’s what I was—I’d beenand landed slick in the middle of one of them Punic wars.
    â€˜When I got on to them ramparts I found lots of other guys all rigged out like me. Every colour under the sun they were, and a Roman camp way over opposite.
    â€˜It was no picnic on that wall, I’ll tell the world; those Roman stiffs were busy doin’ the evening hate stuff on us poor bums. Arrows flying in all directions, there were, and lumps of stone which fellers were hurling with a kind of sling. A great buck negro come up to me and slapped me on the back. “Come on, yo’ skate,” he yelled. “Lend a hand at dat dar bar,” and he pushed me towards a bunch of flats who were hauling on a kind of capstan thing. I got busy, and Lordy—didn’t I sweat. We were winding up a powerful big catapult affair with a lump of rock the size of a Ford car in it; say, you should ha’ seen that morsel fly—up in the air it went—and down, down, down—slick into the Roman camp way over.
    â€˜Believe me, friends, we just don’t know what war can be. About fifty of them Romans got busy with a long sort of ladder. They ran it against our wall, then up they shinned like monkeys up a tree, and that buck nigger he yelled at me: “Hoi, fat face—dis ain’t no toime fer put an’ take, get busy wiv da molten lead.”
    â€˜I looked around, and there were some fellers hoisting a cauldron on long iron bars. I lent a hand and we got it on the wall. “Let it rip, Bo,” yelled the black, and we tipped it over the side.
    â€˜Talk about a nightmare—I thought I’d been took, and gone to hell. Half of ’em were roast like pork chops, and the rest fled screaming, like the Polak women at a death, on the lower East Side.
    â€˜One bird had got up on the rampart and another was left clinging with his fingers to the wall. They downed the first chap and pushed him in the catapult. Up he went like a catherine wheel, all arms and legs. I tell you he travelled some, ninety miles an hour back to his pals. And the other young buck—a greasy-looking Greek—went up to him, rammed a dagger into both his eyes, and kicked him off the wall. I nearly threw a fit, I was that het up!
    â€˜Yep, it weren’t no free lunch for tired workers, but them Romans had had enough for the time being, and most of myoutfit got down off the wall. The Cen-too-rion didn’t seem to want us any, so I thought it about time to make my way up town—ye see, I wanted to have a look around, and find out if I was Benjamin P. Hooker, a respectable citizen of the U.S.A., or a Barbarian mercenary in the pay of these murderous Carthaginians. I had all the instincts of the one, and all the