The Kindlier Mood Will Help You To A Truer
Appreciation Of That Peculiar Keeping Of The Churches Which The Stranger
Is Apt To Encounter In His Approach.
Be tender of the hapless mendicants
at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt
and old.
Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of
cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which,
though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving,
and are the repository of many rejected fables waiting to be recognized
as facts again. I, for instance, committed the potential error of wholly
rejecting with scorn the services of an authorized guide to the Church
of St. John Lateran because he said the tariff was three francs. But
after wandering, the helpless prey of my own Baedeker, up and down the
huge temple, I was glad to find him waiting my emergence where I had
left him, in the church porch, one of the most pathetic figures that
ever wrung the remorseful heart.
His poor black clothes showed the lustre of inveterate wear; his
waistcoat would have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his
shoes, if they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures,
reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar, and the
forlorn gentility of his hat. His beard had not been shaved for three
days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as good a reason as that his
shirt had not been washed for seven.
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