The plan of the encampment itself was like the house on a larger scale. The huts were built around the inside of the palisade, with a separating space or belt of land that was never plowed or built on—the _pomerium_, the space “before the wall.” In the middle was an open square which was to the town what the _atrium_ was to the house,—the common ground, where public worship was held, announcements made, and public affairs social or religious carried on. Here was the beehive hut with the sacred fire, and all other temples or public buildings there might be would open on this square. The line of encircling houses made a sort of inner defense line, and even if any stranger could have climbed the wall for purposes of robbery or spying, it would have been hard for him to pass the houses without being found out.
This was the ancient way in which all the towns of this race were built. As the towns increased in size, other gates were opened, and streets laid out, but always after the same general plan. And as a family never stayed indoors when it was possible to work or play in the open air, so the colonists did not stay inside their wall when they could go out on the common land and make it fruitful. Their descendants are seldom contented to live inside walls and streets, where they can have no land of their own. They find homes outside, where they can have land to dig up and plant and tend and watch, season after season,—and in the thousands of years since they began to plant and to reap, they have gone almost everywhere in the world.
While the colonists were clearing the land on the Square Hill, building huts and laying out farms, they saw nothing of Romulus and Remus. The old shepherd Faustulus came up now and then to look at the work as it went on, and plainly thought these newcomers wonderful and superior beings. But the wolf’s foster children were fighters, not husbandmen, and this work was not in their line at all.
The fathers of the colony were not altogether sorry that this was so. They felt that if the hunters, woodsmen, shepherds, soldiers of fortune, and outlawed men Romulus commanded should happen to quarrel with peaceable people like the settlers, it might create a very unpleasant state of things. The brothers themselves were friendly enough, but it was not certain whether they could keep their men from plunder or fighting if they tried. Such bands, so far as Colonus and his friends had known of them, were like a pack of wolves,—the chiefs only held their leadership by being stronger, fiercer and more determined than the others. Their group of rude huts in the forest was not at all like a civilized town, from what they said of it, and they never seemed to give any attention to the gods or to worship. Perhaps they did not know much about such things. Even those who came from civilized places had wandered about so much that they seemed to think one place as good as another. They had no idea of the feeling that made their home, to the colonists, dearer than any other place ever could be. It was so not because it was pleasanter, or because they had more comforts than others, but because it was home, the place where people knew and trusted one another and trusted in the unseen dwellers by the fire to protect and guide them, and to make them wise and just in their dealings with one another.