It Was Not Much Crowded By Visitors; Though There Were Strings Of Them
At The Heels Of The Respective Guides, With, I Thought, A Prevalence Of
The Germans, Who Are Now Overrunning Italy; I Am Sorry To Say They Are
Not Able To Keep It Cheap, At Least For Other Nationalities.
Among these
I noted two little smiling, shining, twinkling Japs, who carried kodaks
for the capture of that classical antiquity which could never really
belong to them.
Their want of a pagan past in common with us may be what
keeps us alien even more than the want of a common Christian tradition.
"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome"
could never mean to our brown companions what they meant to us; but they
put on a polite air of being interested in the Graeco-Roman ruin, and
were so gentle and friendly that one could almost feel they were
fellow-men. Very likely they were; at any rate, until we are at war with
them I shall believe so.
Our guide, whom we had really bought the whole use of at the gate,
thriftily took on another party, with our leave, and it was pleasant to
find that the American type from Utah was the same as from Ohio or
Massachusetts; with all our differences we are the most homogeneous
people under the sun, and likest a large family. We all frankly got
tired at about the same time at the same place, and agreed that we had,
without the amphitheatre, had enough when we ended at the Street of
Tombs, where the tombs are in so much better repair than the houses.
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