t was the
first time I had been permitted to taste a fermented liquor. I liked it
very much, and got two glasses of it; and when we rose to depart I was
greatly perplexed, and my father was vastly tickled, to discover a lack
of coherence between my legs and my intentions. It speedily passed off,
for the wines are of the lightest and airiest description; but when, a
little later on in life, I came to read that Horatian verse describing
how, turning from barbaric splendors such as the Persians affect, he
binds his brows with simple myrtle, and sips, beneath the shadow of his
garden bower, the pure vintage of the native grape, I better appreciated
the poetry of the theme from having enjoyed that Testaccionesque
experience.

It was in Rome, too, that I first came in contact with death. It aroused
my liveliest curiosity, but, as I remember, no alarm; partly, I suspect,
because I was unable to believe that there was anything real in the
spectacle. The scene has been woven into the texture of the Italian
romance; it is there described almost as it actually presented itself
to the author's observation. A dead monk of the Capuchin order lay on a
bier in the nave of their church, and while we looked at him a stream
of blood flowed from his nostrils. We went down afterwards, I recollect,
into the vaults, and saw the fine, Oriental loam in which the body was
to lie; and it seems to me there were arches and other architectural
features composed of skulls and bones of long-dead brothers of the
order. He must have been a fantastic and saturnine genius who first
suggested this idea.

Another subterranean expedition of ours was to the Catacombs, the
midnight passages of which seemed to be made of bones, and niches
containing the dust of unknown mortality, which were duskily revealed in
the glimmer of our moccoli as we passed along in single file. Sometimes
we came to chambers, one of which had in it a bier covered with glass,
in which was a body which still preserved some semblance of the
human form. There were occasional openings in the vaulted roof of the
corridors, but for the most part the darkness was Egyptian, and for a
few moments a thrill of anxiety was caused by the disappearance either
of my sister Una or of Ada Shepard; I forget which. They were soon
found, but the guide read us a homily upon the awful peril of lifelong
entombment which encompassed us. But the air was dry and cool, and the
whole adventure, from my point of