One must make
light of such things or sink under them; and if I am trying to be a
little gay, it is for the readers' sake, whom I would not have perish of
their realization. Our guide spared us nothing, such was his conscience
or his science, and I wish I could remember his name, for I could
commend him as most intelligent, even, when least intelligible.
However, the traveller will know him by the winning smile of his
rosy-faced little son, who follows him round and is doubtless bringing
himself up as the guide of coming generations of tourists. There had
been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the white dust of the street
before our hotel, but the cold of the early morning, though it had not
been too much for the birds that sang in the garden back of us, had left
a skim of ice in damp spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon,
the ice was visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where
crowds of people wandered severally or collectively about in the
half-frozen mud.
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