Roman Holidays, and Others by William Dean Howells
page 56 of 280 (20%)
page 56 of 280 (20%)
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upon them. Still, it was a mesh of streets, out of which you would in
vain have sought your way if you had been caught in it alone; though it is mostly so level that if you had mounted a truncated column almost anywhere you could have looked over the labyrinth to its verge. It was not much crowded by visitors; though there were strings of them at the heels of the respective guides, with, I thought, a prevalence of the Germans, who are now overrunning Italy; I am sorry to say they are not able to keep it cheap, at least for other nationalities. Among these I noted two little smiling, shining, twinkling Japs, who carried kodaks for the capture of that classical antiquity which could never really belong to them. Their want of a pagan past in common with us may be what keeps us alien even more than the want of a common Christian tradition. "The glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome" could never mean to our brown companions what they meant to us; but they put on a polite air of being interested in the Graeco-Roman ruin, and were so gentle and friendly that one could almost feel they were fellow-men. Very likely they were; at any rate, until we are at war with them I shall believe so. Our guide, whom we had really bought the whole use of at the gate, thriftily took on another party, with our leave, and it was pleasant to find that the American type from Utah was the same as from Ohio or Massachusetts; with all our differences we are the most homogeneous people under the sun, and likest a large family. We all frankly got tired at about the same time at the same place, and agreed that we had, without the amphitheatre, had enough when we ended at the Street of |
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