at pope's
angelic face, and when one of the Americans came to our room and wanted
dad to play cinch, he was indignant, and said: "I would as soon think
of robbing a child's bank," and we went to bed, and if dad wasn't a
converted man I never saw one.

Well, sir, trouble, and sorrow, and religion, don't last very long on
dad. The next morning we talked things over, and I quoted all the Roman
stuff I could think of to dad, such as "In that elder day, to be a Roman
was greater than a king," but before I could think twice there was a
commotion in the streets and a porter came and made us take off our
hats, because the king was riding by, and we looked at the king, and dad
was hot. He said that fellow was nothing but a railroad hand, disguised
in a uniform, and, by ginger, if we had seen that king out west working
on a railroad, with canvas clothes on, he would not have looked like
a king, on a bet. There was nothing but his good clothes that stood
between the king and a dago digging sewers in Chicago.

After the king and his ninespots had passed, dad said: "When you are in
Rome, you must do as the Romans do," and he said he wanted to get
that heavy feeling off his shoulders, which he got at the religious
procession, and wanted me to suggest something devilish that we could
do, and I told him we better go and see the "Catacombs." He wanted
to know if it was anything like "a trip to Chinatown," or the "Black
Crook," and I told him it was worse. Then he asked me if there was much
low neck and long stockings in the "Catacombs," and I told him there was
a plenty, and he said he was just ripe to see that kind of a show, and
so we took a carriage for the "Catacombs," and dad could hardly keep
still till we got there.

I suppose I ought to be killed for fooling dad, but he craved for
excitement, and he got it. The "Catacombs" are where Roman citizens have
been buried for thousands of years, in graves hewn out of solid rock,
and they are petrified, and after they have laid in the graves for a
few hundred years, the mummified bodies are taken out and stood up in
corners, if the bodies will hang together, and if not the bones are
piled up around for scenery.

We had to take torches to go in, and we wandered through corridors,
gazing at the remains, until dad asked one of the men with us what it
all meant, and the man said it was the greatest show on earth. Dad began
to think he was nutty, and when I laughed, and said: "That is gre