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By Root 8946 0

final y he left them there. At Verona they piled off to check their dufflebags and cots to Rome. It was suppertime so they decided to walk around the town and spend the night. In the morning they went to see the ancient theatre and the great peachcolored marble church of San Zeno. Then they sat around the café at the station until a train came by for Rome. The train was jampacked with officers in pale blue and pale green cloaks; by Bologna they'd gotten tired of sitting on the floor of the vestibule and decided they must see the leaning towers. Then they went to Pistoa, Lucca, Pisa and back to the main line at Florence. When the con-ductors shook their heads over the orders of movement they explained that they'd been misinformed and due to ignorance of the language had taken the wrong train. At Florence, where it was rainy and cold and the buildings al looked like the replicas of them they'd seen at home, the station master put them forcibly on the express for Rome, but they sneaked out the other side after it had started and got into the local for Assisi. From there they got to Siena by way of San Gimignano, as ful of towers as New York, in a hack they hired for the day, and ended up one fine spring morning ful up to the neck with painting and architecture and oil and garlic and scenery, looking at the Signorel i frescoes in the cathedral at Orvieto. They stayed there al day looking at the great fresco of the Last Judgment, drinking the magnificent wine and basking in the sunny square outside. When they got to Rome, to the

-206-station next to the baths of Diocletian, they felt pretty bad at the prospect of giving up their passes; they were amazed when the employee merely stamped them and gave them back, saying, "Per il ritorno."

They went to a hotel and cleaned up, and then pooling the last of their money went on a big bust with a high-class meal, Frascati wine and asti for dessert, a vaudevil e show and a cabaret on the Via Roma where they met an American girl they cal ed the baroness who promised to show them the town. By the end of the evening nobody had enough money left to go home with the baroness or any of her charming ladyfriends, so they hired a cab with their last ten lire to take them out to see the Colosseum by moonlight. The great masses of ruins, the engraved stones, the names, the stately Roman names, the old cabdriver with his oilcloth stovepipe hat and his green soupstrainers recommending whorehouses under the last quarter of the ruined moon, the great masses of masonry ful of arches and columns piled up everywhere into the night, the boom of the word Rome dying away in pompous chords into the past, sent them to bed with their heads whirling, Rome throbbing in their ears so that they could not sleep. Next morning Dick got up while the others were stil dead to the world and went round to the Red Cross; he was suddenly nervous and worried so that he couldn't eat his breakfast. At the office he saw a stoutish Bostonian Major who seemed to be running things, and asked him straight out what the devil the trouble was. The Major hemmed and hawed and kept the conversation in an agree-able tone, as one Harvard man to another. He talked about indiscretions and the oversensitiveness of the Italians. As a matter of fact the censor didn't like the tone of certain letters, etcetera, etcetera. Dick said he felt he ought to ex-plain his position, and that if the Red Cross felt he hadn't done his duty they ought to give him a courtmartial, he said he felt there were many men in his position who had

-207-pacifist views but now that the country was at war were wil ing to do any kind of work they could to help, but that didn't mean he believed in the war, he felt he ought to be al owed to explain his position. The major said Ah wel he quite understood, etcetera, etcetera, but that the young should realize the importance of discretion, etcetera, etcetera, and that the whole thing had been satisfactorily explained as an indiscretion; as a matter of fact the inci-dent was closed. Dick kept saying, he ought to be al owed to