bewildering suggestion of the depth at which the different periods of
Rome underlie one another spoke from the mouth of the imperial well or
cistern which had been sunk on the top of a republican well or cistern
at another corner of the arch. In a place not far off, looking like a
potter's clay pit, were graves so old that they seem to have antedated
the skill of man to spell any record of himself; and in the small
building which seems the provisional repository of the archaeologist's
finds we saw skeletons of the immemorial dead in the coffins of split
trees still shutting them imperfectly in. Mostly the bones and bark were
of the same indifferent interest, but the eternal pathos of human grief
appealed from what mortal part remained of a little child, with beads on
her tattered tunic and an ivory bracelet on her withered arm. History in
the presence of such world-old atomies seemed an infant babbling of
yesterday, in what it could say of the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of
the Emperors, the Rome of the Republicans, the Rome of the Kings, the
Rome of the Shepherds and Cowherds, through which a shaft sunk in the
Forum would successively pierce in reaching those aboriginals whose
sepulchres alone witnessed that they had ever lived.

It is the voluble sorrow common to all the emotional visitors in Rome
that the past of the different generations has not been treated by the
present with due tenderness, and the Colosseum is a case notoriously in
point. But, if it was an Italian archaeologist who destroyed the wilding
growths in the Colosseum and scraped it to a bareness which nature is
again trying to clothe with grass and weeds, it ought to be remembered
that it is another Italian archaeologist who has set laurels all up and
down the slopes of the Forum, and has invited roses and honeysuckles to
bloom wherever they shall not interfere with science, but may best help
repair the wounds he must needs deal the soil in researches which seem
no mere dissections, but feats of a conservative, almost a constructive
surgery. It is said that the German archaeologists objected to those
laurels where the birds sing so sweetly; perhaps they thought them not
strictly scientific; but when the German Kaiser, who always knows so
much better than all the other Germans put together, visited the Forum,
he liked them, and he parted from the Genius Loci with the imperial
charge, "Laurels, laurels, evermore laurels." After that the emotional
tourist