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The lares, the local gods, the deified heroes associated with them, were either ancestors idealised or ideals of manhood taking the form of patrons and supernatural protectors. Jupiter Capitolinus and the Spirit of Rome were a single object. To worship Jupiter in that Capitol was to dedicate oneself to the service of Rome.
The sacrifice of the goat is very interesting, so I am going to describe it in detail. A child of the male sex is sent to invite several married ladies, old women of twenty or twenty-five, to witness the worship of the Lares and Penates. Each family has a household goddess of its own which is not impossible, since the Hindu gods number thirty-three crores.
This was different. He was profoundly depressed. He wandered out of the crowd and, after colliding with a man from the caterer's in a dark rear hall, found his way up the servant's staircase to the small back room where he kept the lares and penates of his quiet life, his pipe, his fishing rods, a shabby old smoking coat, and back files of magazines which he intended some day to read, when he got round to it.
Oh, no! we were only the escort of a political officer. We had been quartered in this border town for more than a year, and the senior officers' lady-wives had brought their lares and penates in three bullock-carts a-piece. I suppose we were objects of envy. We had all the excitement of novelty without any of the penalties of active warfare.
Blended in some strange way it seems to be with my faint knowledge of an elder world, whose household gods were also the beloved dead; and there is a weird sweetness in this place, like a shadowing of Lares. Then, her brief prayer over, she turns to her miniature furnace again.
This division, which had primary reference to the soil alone and applied only inferentially to those who possessed it, was merely for administrative purposes, and in particular never had any religious significance attached to it; for the fact that in each of the city-districts there were six chapels of the enigmatical Argei no more confers upon them the character of ritual districts than the erection of an altar to the Lares in each street implies such a character in the streets.
Then came the inevitable to the elders, and it became necessary to convert all property into cash. We were happy in being able to retain a good many of our household gods, and they are the Lares and Penates of our several homes to this day. We had long since ceased to think of Mammy Becky she was never Rebecca as property. In fact, we younger ones never thought of her as such.
Mary was fond of her house in Munster Court. It was her own; and her father and Miss Tallowax between them had enabled her to make it very pretty. The married woman who has not some pet lares of her own is but a poor woman.
By the family Lares and Penates the young soldier tells of the awful sights of Versailles. The thousand captured cannon of the Communists, splashed with human blood, the wanton ruin of the lovely grounds of the Bois, dear to the Parisian heart, and all the strange scenes of the gleaning of the fields of death show how the touch of anarchy has seared the heart of France.
There was no standing against the youngster's strong will, and at five o'clock that same evening the Major found himself proceeding through the town towards the Waterport for embarkation, by no means fully reconciled to the abandonment of his beloved Lares.
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