hose people who shared our nights and who, with us, have outlived them.
Cowardice long since convinced me that it is not of the dead, but of the
living, only good should be spoken--and if good cannot be spoken, what
then? However, it is not in pursuit of problems that I have busied
myself in reviving those old nights, but rather for the pleasure we all
of us have, as the years go on, in feeling our way back along the
Corridors of Time and living our past over again in memory. If I go
further and live mine over again in print, it is because I like to think
the fault will not lie with me if it altogether dies--I have given it,
anyway, the chance of a longer lease of life.

II

NIGHTS

IN ROME

IN ROME

I

It will give an idea of what ages ago those nights were, and of the
youth I brought to them, if I say that I arrived in Rome on the first
tandem tricycle ever seen in Italy.

I can look back to it now with pride, for I was, in my way, a pioneer,
but there was not much to be proud about at the time. Rome was so little
impressed that J., my fellow pioneer, and I,--J. and I who in every town
on the way from Florence had been the delight of the gaping crowd, J.
and I who in all those beautiful October days on the white roads of
Italy had suffered from nothing save the excess of the people's amiable
attentions,--scarcely showed ourselves beyond the _Porta del Popolo_ and
the Piazza of the same name, before we were arrested for driving the
tandem furiously through the _Corso_--as if anybody could drive anything
furiously through the _Corso_ at the hour before sunset, when all the
world comes home from the _Borghese_. But two policemen, drawing their
swords as if they meant business, commanded us to dismount and, between
them, we walked ignominiously to the hotel, pushing the tricycle; and
an astonished and not in the least admiring crowd followed; and the
policeman asked us for a _lira_, which we refused, taking it for a proof
of the corruption of modern Rome--and they were so within their legal
rights that I do not care to say for how many more than one we were
asked a few weeks later by the Syndic, whom we could not refuse; and
altogether I do not think we were to blame if, after the policemen and
the swords and the crowd had gone and the tricycle was locked up, and we
wandered from the hotel in the gathering dusk, we were the two most
ill-tempered young people who ever set out to enjoy their first nig