on, I asked an Italian gentleman, who
owned to have seen the affair, why the officer did not break through the
crowd and arrest the fighters. "They had knives," he explained, and it
seemed a good reason for the carabiniere's forbearance, as far as it
went; but I thought of the short work the brute locust of an Irish
policeman at home would have made of the knives. My friend said he had
himself gone to one of the municipal police who was looking on at a
pleasant remove and said, "Those fellows have knives; they will kill
each other," and the municipal policeman had answered, with the calm of
an antique Roman sentinel on duty in time of earthquake, "Let them
kill."

I could not approve of so much impartiality, but afterward it seemed to
me I had little to be proud of in the shorter and easier method of our
own police, as contrasted with the caution of that Roman carabiniere who
left the combatants to the mild might of their friends' moral suasion.
It was better that the youth should escape, if he did, without a
vexatious criminal trial; he may have been no more to blame than the
other, who, I learned, had been carried off, in the honorable manner I
saw, to a doctor and had his stab looked to. It was not dangerous, and
the whole affair ended so. Besides, as I learned, still longer
afterward, when it was quite safe for a cabman from the same stand to
speak, the combatants were not Romans, but peasants from the Campagna,
who had come in with their market-carts and had become heated with the
bad spirits which the peasants have the habit of drinking five or six
glasses of when they visit Rome. "What we call benzine," my cabman
explained. "We Romans," he added from a moral height, "drink only a
glass or two of wine, and we never carry knives."

He may have been right concerning the peacefulness of the Romans and
their sobriety, and I am bound to say that I never saw any other violent
scene during my stay. Sometimes I heard loud quarrelling among our
cabmen, and sometimes I was the subject of it, when one driver snatched
me, an impartial prey, from another. But the bad feeling, if there was
really any, quickly passed, and some other day I fell to the cabman who
had been wronged of me. I had not always the fine sense of being booty
which I had one day on coming out of a church and blundering toward the
wrong cab. Then the driver whom I had left waiting at the door seized me
from the very cab of an unjust rival with the indignant