Bagster made a vague gesture toward the city that lay beneath
us. There seemed to be something in the scene that worried him. "I can't
make it seem real," he said. "I have continually to say to myself, 'That
is Rome, Italy, and not Rome, New York.' I can't make the connection
between the place and the historical personages I have read about. I
can't realize that the Epistle to the Romans was written to the people
who lived down there. Just back of that new building is the very spot
where Romulus would have lived if he had ever existed. On those very
streets Scipio Africanus walked, and Caesar and Cicero and Paul and
Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus and Belisarius, and Hildebrand and
Michelangelo, and at one time or another about every one you ever heard
of. And how many people came to get emotions they couldn't get anywhere
else! There was Goethe. How he felt! He took it all in. And there was
Shelley writing poetry in the Baths of Caracalla. And there was Gibbon."

"But we can't all expect to be Shelleys or even Gibbons," I suggested.

"I know it," said Bagster, ruefully. "But if one has only a little
vessel, he ought to fill it. But somehow the historical associations
crowd each other out. When I left home I bought Hare's 'Walks in Rome.'
I thought I would take a walk a day as long as they lasted. It seemed a
pleasant way of combining physical and intellectual exercise. But do you
know, I could not keep up those walks. They were too concentrated for my
constitution. I wasn't equal to them. Out in California they used to
make wagers with the stranger that he couldn't eat a broiled quail every
day for ten days. I don't see why he couldn't, but it seemed that the
thought of to-morrow's quail, and the feeling that it was compulsory,
turned him against what otherwise might have been a pleasure. It's so
with the 'Walks.' It's appalling to think that every morning you have to
start out for a constitutional, and be confronted with the events of the
last twenty-five centuries. The events are piled up one on another.
There they are, and here you are, and what are you going to do about
them?"

"I suppose that there isn't much that you can do about them," I
remarked.

"But we ought to do what we can," said Bagster. "When I do have an
emotion, something immediately turns up to contradict it. It's like
wandering through a big hotel, looking for your room, when you are on
the wrong floor. Here you are as likely as not to find yours