vessel, he ought to fill it. But somehow the historical associations
crowd each other out. When I left home I bought Hare's 'Walks in Rome.'
I thought I would take a walk a day as long as they lasted. It seemed a
pleasant way of combining physical and intellectual exercise. But do you
know, I could not keep up those walks. They were too concentrated for my
constitution. I wasn't equal to them. Out in California they used to
make wagers with the stranger that he couldn't eat a broiled quail every
day for ten days. I don't see why he couldn't, but it seemed that the
thought of to-morrow's quail, and the feeling that it was compulsory,
turned him against what otherwise might have been a pleasure. It's so
with the 'Walks.' It's appalling to think that every morning you have to
start out for a constitutional, and be confronted with the events of the
last twenty-five centuries. The events are piled up one on another.
There they are, and here you are, and what are you going to do about
them?"

"I suppose that there isn't much that you can do about them," I
remarked.

"But we ought to do what we can," said Bagster. "When I do have an
emotion, something immediately turns up to contradict it. It's like
wandering through a big hotel, looking for your room, when you are on
the wrong floor. Here you are as likely as not to find yourself in the
wrong century. In Rome everything turns out, on inquiry, to be something
else. There's something impressive about a relic if it's the relic of
one thing. But if it's the relic of a dozen different kinds of things
it's hard to pick out the appropriate emotion. I find it hard to adjust
my mind to these composite associations."

"Now just look at this," he said, opening his well-thumbed Baedeker: