rt of man to compel you to prove your
assertion.

We found the boundaries of the first Forum of the Republic, and poppa,
pacing it in a soft felt hat and a silk duster, offered a Senatorial
contrast to history. He looked round him with dignity and made the
gesture which goes with his most sustained oratorical flights. "I
wouldn't have backed up Cato in everything," he said thoughtfully. "No.
There were occasions on which I should have voted against the old man,
and the little American school-boys of to-day would have had to decline
'Mugwumpus' in consequence." And at the thought of Cannae and Trasimene
the nineteenth century Senator from Illinois fiercely pulled his beard.

We turned our pilgrim feet to where the Colosseum wheels against the sky
and gives up the world's eternal supreme note of splendour and of
cruelty; and along the solitary dusty Appian Way, as if it were a
country lane of the time we know, came a ragged Roman urchin with a
basket. Under the triumphal arch of Titus, where his forefathers jeered
at the Jews in manacled procession, we bargained with him for his purple
plums. He had the eyes and the smile of immemorial Italy for his own,
and the bones of Imperial Rome in equal inheritance, which he also
wished to sell, by the way, in jagged fragments from his trouser
pockets. And it linked up those early days with that particular
afternoon in a curiously simple way to think that from the Caesars to
King Humbert there has never been a year without just such
brown-cheeked, dark-eyed, imperfectly washed little Roman boys upon the
Appian Way.

CHAPTER XII.

We were too late for the hotel _dejeuner_, and had to order it, I
remember, _a la carte_. That was why the Count was kept waiting. We were
kept waiting, too, which seemed at the moment of more importance, since
the atmosphere of the classics had given us excellent appetites.
Emmeline decided upon ices and _petits fours_ in the Corso for her
party, after which they were going to let nothing interfere with their
inspection of the prison of St. Paul; but we came back and ordered a
haricot. In the cavernous recesses beyond the door which opened
kitchen-ward, commands resounded, and a quarter of an hour later a boy
walked casually through the dining-room bearing beans in a basket. Time
went on, and the Senator was compelled to send word that he had not
ordered the repast for the following day. The small waiter then made a
pretence of activity, and