No wonder the young official's head (he was not much over thirty) was somewhat turned. "I thought," he said, in one of his speeches afterwards—introducing with a quiet humour, and with all a practised orator's skill, one of those personal anecdotes which relieve a long speech—"I thought in my heart, at the time, that the people at Rome must be talking of nothing but my quæstorship." And he goes on to tell his audience how he was undeceived.
"The people of Sicily had devised for me unprecedented honours. So I left the island in a state of great elation, thinking that the Roman people would at once offer me everything without my seeking. But when I was leaving my province, and on my road home, I happened to land at Puteoli just at the time when a good many of our most fashionable people are accustomed to resort to that neighbourhood. I very nearly collapsed, gentlemen, when a man asked me what day I had left Rome, and whether there was any news stirring? When I made answer that I was returning from my province—'Oh! yes, to be sure,' said he; 'Africa, I believe?' 'No,' said I to him, considerably annoyed and disgusted; 'from Sicily.' Then somebody else, with the air of a man who knew all about it, said to him—'What! don't you know that he was Quæstor at Syracuse?' [It was at Lilybæum—quite a different district.] No need to make a long story of it; I swallowed my indignation, and made as though I, like the rest, had come there for the waters. But I am not sure, gentlemen, whether that scene did not do me more good than if everybody then and there had publicly
