The doctor put up his eye-gla.s.s--procured for such occasions:
"Ah--what did you say this gentleman"s name was?"
"Christopher Colombo!--ze great Christopher Colombo!"
"Christopher Colombo--the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he do?"
"Discover America!--discover America, Oh, ze devil!"
"Discover America. No--that statement will hardly wash. We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo --pleasant name--is--is he dead?"
"Oh, corpo di Baccho!--three hundred year!"
"What did he die of?"
"I do not know!--I can not tell."
"Small-pox, think?"
"I do not know, genteelmen!--I do not know what he die of!"
"Measles, likely?"
"May be--may be--I do not know--I think he die of somethings."
"Parents living?"
"Im-poseeeble!"
"Ah--which is the bust and which is the pedestal?"
"Santa Maria!--zis ze bust!--zis ze pedestal!"
"Ah, I see, I see--happy combination--very happy combination, indeed.
Is--is this the first time this gentleman was ever on a bust?"
That joke was lost on the foreigner--guides can not master the subtleties of the American joke.
We have made it interesting for this Roman guide. Yesterday we spent three or four hours in the Vatican, again, that wonderful world of curiosities. We came very near expressing interest, sometimes--even admiration--it was very hard to keep from it. We succeeded though.
n.o.body else ever did, in the Vatican museums. The guide was bewildered --non-plussed. He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a failure; we never showed any interest in any thing. He had reserved what he considered to be his greatest wonder till the last--a royal Egyptian mummy, the best preserved in the world, perhaps. He took us there. He felt so sure, this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to him:
"See, genteelmen!--Mummy! Mummy!"
The eye-gla.s.s came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever.
"Ah,--Ferguson--what did I understand you to say the gentleman"s name was?"
"Name?--he got no name!--Mummy!--"Gyptian mummy!"
"Yes, yes. Born here?"
"No! "Gyptian mummy!"
"Ah, just so. Frenchman, I presume?"
"No!--not Frenchman, not Roman!--born in Egypta!"
"Born in Egypta. Never heard of Egypta before. Foreign locality, likely. Mummy--mummy. How calm he is--how self-possessed. Is, ah--is he dead?"
"Oh, sacre bleu, been dead three thousan" year!"
The doctor turned on him savagely:
"Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this! Playing us for Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn! Trying to impose your vile second-hand carca.s.ses on us!--thunder and lightning, I"ve a notion to--to--if you"ve got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!--or by George we"ll brain you!"
We make it exceedingly interesting for this Frenchman. However, he has paid us back, partly, without knowing it. He came to the hotel this morning to ask if we were up, and he endeavored as well as he could to describe us, so that the landlord would know which persons he meant. He finished with the casual remark that we were lunatics. The observation was so innocent and so honest that it amounted to a very good thing for a guide to say.
There is one remark (already mentioned,) which never yet has failed to disgust these guides. We use it always, when we can think of nothing else to say. After they have exhausted their enthusiasm pointing out to us and praising the beauties of some ancient bronze image or broken-legged statue, we look at it stupidly and in silence for five, ten, fifteen minutes--as long as we can hold out, in fact--and then ask:
"Is--is he dead?"
That conquers the serenest of them. It is not what they are looking for --especially a new guide. Our Roman Ferguson is the most patient, unsuspecting, long-suffering subject we have had yet. We shall be sorry to part with him. We have enjoyed his society very much. We trust he has enjoyed ours, but we are hara.s.sed with doubts.
We have been in the catacombs. It was like going down into a very deep cellar, only it was a cellar which had no end to it. The narrow pa.s.sages are roughly hewn in the rock, and on each hand as you pa.s.s along, the hollowed shelves are carved out, from three to fourteen deep; each held a corpse once. There are names, and Christian symbols, and prayers, or sentences expressive of Christian hopes, carved upon nearly every sarcophagus. The dates belong away back in the dawn of the Christian era, of course. Here, in these holes in the ground, the first Christians sometimes burrowed to escape persecution. They crawled out at night to get food, but remained under cover in the day time. The priest told us that St. Sebastian lived under ground for some time while he was being hunted; he went out one day, and the soldiery discovered and shot him to death with arrows. Five or six of the early Popes--those who reigned about sixteen hundred years ago--held their papal courts and advised with their clergy in the bowels of the earth. During seventeen years--from A.D. 235 to A.D. 252--the Popes did not appear above ground. Four were raised to the great office during that period. Four years apiece, or thereabouts. It is very suggestive of the unhealthiness of underground graveyards as places of residence. One Pope afterward spent his entire pontificate in the catacombs--eight years. Another was discovered in them and murdered in the episcopal chair. There was no satisfaction in being a Pope in those days. There were too many annoyances. There are one hundred and sixty catacombs under Rome, each with its maze of narrow pa.s.sages crossing and recrossing each other and each pa.s.sage walled to the top with scooped graves its entire length. A careful estimate makes the length of the pa.s.sages of all the catacombs combined foot up nine hundred miles, and their graves number seven millions. We did not go through all the pa.s.sages of all the catacombs. We were very anxious to do it, and made the necessary arrangements, but our too limited time obliged us to give up the idea. So we only groped through the dismal labyrinth of St. Callixtus, under the Church of St. Sebastian. In the various catacombs are small chapels rudely hewn in the stones, and here the early Christians often held their religious services by dim, ghostly lights. Think of ma.s.s and a sermon away down in those tangled caverns under ground!
In the catacombs were buried St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and several other of the most celebrated of the saints. In the catacomb of St. Callixtus, St.
Bridget used to remain long hours in holy contemplation, and St. Charles Borromeo was wont to spend whole nights in prayer there. It was also the scene of a very marvelous thing.
"Here the heart of St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with divine love as to burst his ribs."
I find that grave statement in a book published in New York in 1808, and written by "Rev. William H. Neligan, LL.D., M. A., Trinity College, Dublin; Member of the Archaeological Society of Great Britain."
Therefore, I believe it. Otherwise, I could not. Under other circ.u.mstances I should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip had for dinner.
This author puts my credulity on its mettle every now and then. He tells of one St. Joseph Calasanctius whose house in Rome he visited; he visited only the house--the priest has been dead two hundred years. He says the Virgin Mary appeared to this saint. Then he continues:
"His tongue and his heart, which were found after nearly a century to be whole, when the body was disinterred before his canonization, are still preserved in a gla.s.s case, and after two centuries the heart is still whole. When the French troops came to Rome, and when Pius VII. was carried away prisoner, blood dropped from it."
To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages, would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it is seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of finished education, an LL.D., M. A., and an Archaeological magnate, it sounds strangely enough. Still, I would gladly change my unbelief for Neligan"s faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.
The old gentleman"s undoubting, unquestioning simplicity has a rare freshness about it in these matter-of-fact railroading and telegraphing days. Hear him, concerning the church of Ara Coeli:
"In the roof of the church, directly above the high altar, is engraved, "Regina Coeli laetare Alleluia." In the sixth century Rome was visited by a fearful pestilence. Gregory the Great urged the people to do penance, and a general procession was formed. It was to proceed from Ara Coeli to St. Peter"s. As it pa.s.sed before the mole of Adrian, now the Castle of St. Angelo, the sound of heavenly voices was heard singing (it was Easter morn,) "Regina Coeli, laetare! alleluia! quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia!
resurrexit sicut dixit; alleluia!" The Pontiff, carrying in his hands the portrait of the Virgin, (which is over the high altar and is said to have been painted by St. Luke,) answered, with the astonished people, "Ora pro n.o.bis Deum, alleluia!" At the same time an angel was seen to put up a sword in a scabbard, and the pestilence ceased on the same day. There are four circ.u.mstances which "CONFIRM"--[The italics are mine--M. T.]--this miracle: the annual procession which takes place in the western church on the feast of St Mark; the statue of St. Michael, placed on the mole of Adrian, which has since that time been called the Castle of St.
Angelo; the antiphon Regina Coeli which the Catholic church sings during paschal time; and the inscription in the church."