rom which an odour of
grease exhaled; there were narrow streets with mounds of garbage in the
middle. In the very palaces, now shorn of their grandeur, appeared
the same decoration of rags waving in the breeze. In the Theatre of
Marcellus one's gaze got lost in the depths of black caves, where smiths
stood out against flames.

This mixture of sumptuousness and squalor, of beauty and ugliness, was
reflected in the people; young and most beautiful women were side by
side with fat, filthy old ones covered with rags, their eyes gloomy, and
of a type that recalled old African Jewesses.

_WHAT CAN BE READ ON WALLS_

Caesar and Kennedy went on toward the Temple of Vesta and followed the
river bank until the Tiber Embankment ended.

Here the banks were green and the river clearer and more poetic. To the
left rose the Aventine with its villas; in the harbour two or three tugs
were tied up; and here and there along the pier stood a crane. Evening
was falling and the sky was filling with pink clouds.

They sat down awhile on the side of the road, and Caesar entertained
himself deciphering the inscriptions written in charcoal on a mud-wall.

"Do you go in for modern epigraphy?" asked Kennedy.

"Yes. It is one of the things I take pleasure in reading, in the towns
I go to; the advertisements in the newspapers and the writings on the
wall."

"It's a good kind of curiosity."

"Yes, I believe one learns more about the real life in a town from such
inscriptions than from the guide- and text-books."

"That's possible. And what conclusions have you drawn from your
observations?"

"They are not of much value. I haven't constructed a science of
wall-inscriptions, as that fake Lambroso would have done."

"But you will construct it surely, when you have lighted on the
underlying system."

"You think my epigraphical science is on the same level as my financial
science. What a mistake!"

"All right. But tell me what you have discovered about different towns."

"London, for instance, I have found, is childish in its inscriptions and
somewhat clownish. When some sentimental foolishness doesn't occur to a
Londoner of the people, some brutality or rough joke occurs to him."

"You are very kind," said Kennedy, laughing.

"Paris has a vulgar, cruel taste; in the Frenchman of the people you
find the tiger alternating with the monkey. There the dominant note on
the walls is the patriotic note, insults to politicians, calling th