informal and so easy that one did not realize how learned it was, and
then of following him down to the scene of his researches and hearing
him speak wisely, poetically, humorously, even, of what he believed he
had reason to expect to find. We stood with him by the Arch of Titus and
saw how the sculptures had been broken from it in the fragments found at
its base, and how the carved marbles had been burned for lime in the
kiln built a few feet off, so that those who wanted the lime need not
have the trouble of carrying the sculptures away before burning them. A
handful of iridescent glass from a house-drain near by, where it had
been thrown by the servants after breaking it, testified of the
continuity of human nature in the domestics of all ages. A somewhat
bewildering suggestion of the depth at which the different periods of
Rome underlie one another spoke from the mouth of the imperial well or
cistern which had been sunk on the top of a republican well or cistern
at another corner of the arch. In a place not far off, looking like a
potter's clay pit, were graves so old that they seem to have antedated
the skill of man to spell any record of himself; and in the small
building which seems the provisional repository of the archaeologist's
finds we saw skeletons of the immemorial dead in the coffins of split
trees still shutting them imperfectly in. Mostly the bones and bark were
of the same indifferent interest, but the eternal pathos of human grief
appealed from what mortal part remained of a little child, with beads on
her tattered tunic and an ivory bracelet on her withered arm. History in
the presence of such world-old atomies seemed an infant babbling of
yesterday, in what it could say of the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of
the Emperors, the Rome of the Republicans, the Rome of the Kings, the
Rome of the Shepherds and Cowherds, through which a shaft sunk in the
Forum would successively pierce in reaching those aboriginals whose
sepulchres alone witnessed that they had ever lived.