Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/278

246 ever; I was greeted with a voice, unmistakably American,—"You couldn't show us, sir, could you, where the Emperor's box was?" Two well-dressed, educated young fellows from Boston, doing a tour in Europe. "And we want to see the place in the Forum where Julius Cæsar's body was burned, and where Mark Antony made his oration."

The next day I met them there. It seemed all too small for such a place, perhaps because it is crowded in every corner with relics of old Rome, which go back to its earliest days. A few years ago to a great extent it was buried forty feet deep with the debris accumulated during so many centuries of ruin, and by the mud brought down by floods in the Tiber. To-day, thanks to the archæologist, one sees so much that it is comparatively easy to reconstruct in imagination the Forum as it was, even in the Kingly period, right back in the days of Romulus, and all through its story, of Julius Cæsar, Augustus, and the Emperors.

I can only briefly touch on one's first impressions of Rome. The seven hills hardly rise to the height one expects, but that is due to the gradual filling up of the valleys which separated them. The old walls, including those of the Kingly period, are splendid examples of Roman work, great masses of tufa rock set without mortar, no less than thirteen miles in circuit, with twenty gates. The Tiber, such a much bigger river than I expected, with its course of three miles within the city walls; the buildings of mediæval and modern Rome, alike in one respect, in the love of the gigantic, which seems to have been always characteristic of Roman architecture; the immense proportions and solidity of such ancient buildings as the Baths of Caracalla, and Diocletian, the aqueducts,