II.

The voice of Rome is baritone, always excepting that of the Roman
locomotive,--the donkey,--which is deep bass, and comes tearing and
braying along at times when it might well be spared. In the still night
season, wandering among the moonlit ruins of the Coliseum, while you
pause and gaze upon the rising tiers of crumbling stone above you,
memory retraces all you have read of the old Roman days: the forms of
the world-conquerors once more people the deserted ruin; the clash of
ringing steel; hot, fiery sunlight; thin, trembling veil of dust pierced
by the glaring eyes of dying gladiators; red-spouting blood; screams of
the mangled martyrs torn by Numidian lions; moans of the dying; fierce
shouts of exultation from the living; smiles from gold-banded girls in
flowing robes, with floating hair, flower-crowned, and perfumed; the hum
of thrice thirty thousand voices hushed to a whisper as the combat hangs
on an uplifted sword; the--

Aw-waw-WAUN-ik! WAW-NIK! WAUN-KI-w-a-w-n! comes like blatant fish-horn
over the silent air, and your dream of the Coliseum ends ignominiously
with this nineteenth-century song of a jackass.

At night you will hear the shrill cry of the screech-owl sounding down
the silent streets in the most thickly-populated parts of the city. Or
you will perhaps be aroused from sleep, as Caper often was, by the
long-drawn-out cadences of some countryman singing a _rondinella_ as he
staggers along the street, fresh from a wine-house. Nothing can be more
melancholy than the concluding part of each verse in these rondinellas,
the voice being allowed to drop from one note to another, as a man
falling from the roof of a very high house may catch at some projection,