A moving-picture
place; and the shopkeeping parasites buzz about you in vermin
swarms and bore holes in your pocketbook until it is all one large
painful welt. The emblem of Venice is the winged lion. It should
be the tapeworm.
In Rome it appears to be a standing rule that every authenticated
guide shall be a violent Socialist and therefore rampingly
anticlerical in all his views. We were in Rome during the season
of pilgrimages. From all parts of Italy, from Bohemia and Hungary
and Spain and Tyrol, and even from France, groups of peasants had
come to Rome to worship in their mother church and be blessed by
the supreme pontiff of their faith. At all hours of the day they
were passing through the streets, bound for Saint Peter's or the
Vatican, the women with kerchiefs over their heads, the men in
their Sunday best, and all with badges and tokens on their breasts.
At the head of each straggling procession would be a black-frocked
village priest, at once proud and humble, nervous and exalted. A
man might be of any religion or of no religion at all, and yet I
fail to see how he could watch, unmoved, the uplifted faces of
these people as they clumped over the cobbles of the Holy City,
praying as they went.
