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Page 47
That druggist's establishment was on the Pincian Hill! It seemed, on
reflection, an outrage. We all looked about us, when we discovered
this, for the other six, and another of the foolish geographical
illusions of the school-room was shattered for each of us. The Rome of
my imagination was as distinctly seven-hilled as a quadruped is
four-legged, the Rome I saw had no eminences to speak of anywhere.
Perhaps, as poppa suggested, business had moved away from the hills and
we should find them in the suburbs, but this we were obliged to leave
unascertained.
Through the warm empty streets we drove and looked at Rome. It was
driving through time, through history, through art, and going backward.
And through the Christian religion, for we started where the pillar of
Pius IX., setting forth the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception,
reaffirmed a modern dogma of the great church across the Tiber; and we
rattled on past other and earlier memorials of that church thick-built
into the Middle Ages, and of the Early Fathers, and of the very
Apostles. All heaped and crowded and over-built, solid and ragged,
decaying and defying decay, clinging to her traditions with both hands,
old Rome jostled before us. Presently uprose a great and crumbling arch
and a difference, and as we passed it the sound of the life of the city
died indistinctly away and a silence grew up, with the smell of the sun
upon grasses and weeds, and we stopped and looked down into C�sar's
world, which lay below us, empty. We gazed in silence for a moment, and
then Emmeline remarked that she could make as good a Forum with a box of
blocks.
"I shouldn't wonder but what you express the sentiments of all
present," said her father admiringly. "Now is it allowable for us to go
down there and make ourselves at home amongst those antique pillars, or
have we got to take the show in from here?"
"No, Malt," said the Senator, helping the ladies out, "I can't say I
agree with you. It's a dead city, that's what it is, and for my part
I've never seen anything so impressive."
"Mr. Wick," remarked Miss Callis, "has not visited Philadelphia."
"Well, for a municipal cemetery," returned Mr. Malt, "it's pretty
uncared for. If there was any enterprise in this capital it would be
suitably railed in with posts and chains, and a monument inscribed 'Here
lies Rome's former greatness' or something like that. But the Italians
haven't got a particle of go--I've noticed that all through."
We went down the wooden stair, a century at a step, and presently walked
and talked, we seven Americans, in that elder Rome that most people know
so much better than the one with St. Peter's and the Corso, because of
the clinging nature of those early impressions which we construe for
ourselves with painful reference to lists of exceptions. We all felt
that it was a small place to have had so much to say to history, and
were obliged to remind ourselves that we weren't looking at the whole of
it. Poppa acknowledged that his tendency to compare it unfavourably, in
spite of the verdict of history, with Chicago was checked by a smell
from the Cloaca Maxima, which proved that the Ancient Romans probably
enjoyed enteric and sewer gas quite as much as we do, although under
names that are to be found only in dictionaries now. Mrs. Malt said the
place surprised her in being so yellow--she had always imagined pictures
of it to have been taken in the sunset, but now she saw that it was
perfectly natural. Acting upon Mr. Malt's advice, we did not attempt to
identify more than the leading features, and I remember distinctly, in
consequence, that the temple of Castor had three columns standing and
the temple of Saturn had eight, while of the Basilica Julia there was
nothing at all but the places where they used to be. Mrs. Malt said it
made her feel quite idolatrous to look at them, and for her part she
couldn't be sorry they had fallen so much into decay--it was only right
and proper. This launched Mr. and Mrs. Malt and my parents upon a
discussion which threatened to become unwisely polemic if Emmeline had
not briefly decided it in favour of Christianity.
Momma and Mrs. Malt expressed a desire above all things to see the
temple and apartments of the Vestal Virgins, which Miss Callis with some
surprise begged them on no account to mention in the presence of the
gentlemen.
"There are some things," remarked Miss Callis austerely, "from which no
respectable married lady would wish to lift the veil of the classics."
Momma was inclined to argue the point, but Miss Callis looked so
shocked that she desisted.
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