let the boys get back from the war and not give them a good big Soldiers' Monument near the Square!' He called the Forum 'the Square.' 'Yes, sir,' he would say, 'you can see just what it was like. Here is where the farmers hitched their teams on Saturday while they sold their market produce and did their shopping and had a few drinks to keep them company on the drive back home.'"
Ogle uttered a sound of distaste. "It must have been rather grating, Dr. Medjila. For an archæologist to stand in a Forum of the Roman Empire and have to listen to"
But Medjila again interrupted. "No, no," he chuckled. "It was precisely the truth, if we omit the technicality of the word 'Saturday.' This man was able to reconstruct the Roman city as it really had been; he saw it as something human. An artist comes here and sees it as a picture; Flaubert is called the founder of realism; but he would have seen Timgad as all blood and drama;—this compatriot of yours alone was the realist, and I would give all the little knowledge I have for use in my decipherings to be able to look at such a place for the first time and understand it as he did. How curious it is! See what the Arab did to this city and this country: it
