All the guides in Rome follow a regular routine with the tourist.  First, of course, they steer you into certain shops in the hope that you will buy something and thereby enable them to earn commissions.  Then, in turn, they carry you to an art gallery, to a church, and to a palace, with stops at other shops interspersed between; and invariably they wind up in the vicinity of some of the ruins.  Ruins is a Roman guide’s middle name; ruins are his one best bet.  In Rome I saw ruins until I was one myself.

We devoted practically an entire day to ruins.  That was the day we drove out the Appian Way, glorious in legend and tale, but not quite so all-fired glorious when you are reeling over its rough and rutted pavement in an elderly and indisposed open carriage, behind a pair of half-broken Roman-nosed horses which insist on walking on their hind legs whenever they tire of going on four.  The Appian Way, as at present constituted, is a considerable disappointment.  For long stretches it runs between high stone walls, broken at intervals by gate-ways, where votive lamps burn before small shrines, and by the tombs of such illustrious dead as Seneca and the Horatii and the Curiatii.  At more frequent intervals are small wine groggeries.  Being built mainly of Italian marble, which is the most enduring and the most unyielding substance to be found in all Italy—­except a linen collar that has been starched in an Italian laundry—­the tombs are in a pretty fair state of preservation; but the inns, without exception, stand most desperately in need of immediate repairing.

A cow in Italy is known by the company she keeps; she rambles about, in and out of the open parlor of the wayside inn, mingling freely with the patrons and the members of the proprietor’s household.  Along the Appian Way a cow never seems to care whom she runs with; and the same is true of the domestic fowls and the family donkey.  A donkey will spend his day in the doorway of a wine shop when he might just as well be enjoying the more sanitary and less crowded surroundings of a stable.  It only goes to show what an ass a donkey is.

Anon, as the fancy writers say, we skirted one of the many wrecked aqueducts that go looping across country to the distant hills, like great stone straddlebugs.  In the vicinity of Rome you are rarely out of sight of one of these aqueducts.  The ancient Roman rulers, you know, curried the favor of the populace by opening baths.  A modern ruler could win undying popularity by closing up a few.

We slowed up at the Circus of Romulus and found it a very sad circus, as such things go—­no elevated stage, no hippodrome track, no centerpole, no trapeze, and only one ring.  P. T. Barnum would have been ashamed to own it.  A broken wall, following the lines of an irregular oval; a cabbage patch where the arena had been; and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry —­this was the Circus of Romulus.  However, it was not the circus of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era was well begun.  Old John J. Romulus would not have stood for that circus a minute.