efore us. Presently uprose a great and crumbling arch
and a difference, and as we passed it the sound of the life of the city
died indistinctly away and a silence grew up, with the smell of the sun
upon grasses and weeds, and we stopped and looked down into Caesar's
world, which lay below us, empty. We gazed in silence for a moment, and
then Emmeline remarked that she could make as good a Forum with a box of
blocks.

"I shouldn't wonder but what you express the sentiments of all
present," said her father admiringly. "Now is it allowable for us to go
down there and make ourselves at home amongst those antique pillars, or
have we got to take the show in from here?"

"No, Malt," said the Senator, helping the ladies out, "I can't say I
agree with you. It's a dead city, that's what it is, and for my part
I've never seen anything so impressive."

"Mr. Wick," remarked Miss Callis, "has not visited Philadelphia."

"Well, for a municipal cemetery," returned Mr. Malt, "it's pretty
uncared for. If there was any enterprise in this capital it would be
suitably railed in with posts and chains, and a monument inscribed 'Here
lies Rome's former greatness' or something like that. But the Italians
haven't got a particle of go--I've noticed that all through."

We went down the wooden stair, a century at a step, and presently walked
and talked, we seven Americans, in that elder Rome that most people know
so much better than the one with St. Peter's and the Corso, because of
the clinging nature of those early impressions which we construe for
ourselves with painful reference to lists of exceptions. We all felt
that it was a small place to have had so much to say to history, and
were obliged to remind ourselves that we weren't looking at the whole of
it. Poppa acknowledged that his tendency to compare it unfavourably, in
spite of the verdict of history, with Chicago was checked by a smell
from the Cloaca Maxima, which proved that the Ancient Romans probably
enjoyed enteric and sewer gas quite as much as we do, although under
names that are to be found only in dictionaries now. Mrs. Malt said the
place surprised her in being so yellow--she had always imagined pictures
of it to have been taken in the sunset, but now she saw that it was
perfectly natural. Acting upon Mr. Malt's advice, we did not attempt to
identify more than the leading features, and I remember distinctly, in
consequence, that the temple of Castor had three columns standin