No ride on the Appian Way is regarded as complete without half an hour’s stop at the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus; so we stopped.  Guided by a brown Trappist, and all of us bearing twisted tapers in our hands, we descended by stone steps deep under the skin of the earth and wandered through dim, dank underground passages, where thousands of early Christians had lived and hid, and held clandestine worship before rude stone altars, and had died and been buried—­died in a highly unpleasant fashion, some of them.

The experience was impressive, but malarial.  Coming away from there I had an argument with a fellow American.  He said that if we had these Catacombs in America we should undoubtedly enlarge them and put in band stands and lunch places, and altogether make them more attractive for picnic parties and Sunday excursionists.  I contended, on the other hand, that if they were in America the authorities would close them up and protect the moldered bones of those early Christians from the vulgar gaze and prying fingers of every impious relic hunter who might come along.  The dispute rose higher and grew warmer until I offered to bet him fifty dollars that I was right and he was wrong.  He took me up promptly—­he had sporting instincts; I’ll say that for him—­and we shook hands on it then and there to bind the wager.  I expect to win that bet.

We had turned off the Appian Way and were crossing a corner of that unutterably hideous stretch of tortured and distorted waste known as the Campagna, which goes tumbling away to the blue Alban Mountains, when we came on the scene of an accident.  A two-wheeled mule cart, proceeding along a crossroad, with the driver asleep in his canopied seat, had been hit by a speeding automobile and knocked galley-west.  The automobile had sped on—­so we were excitedly informed by some other tourists who had witnessed the collision—­leaving the wreckage bottom side up in the ditch.  The mule was on her back, all entangled in the twisted ruination of her gaudy gear, kicking out in that restrained and genteel fashion in which a mule always kicks when she is desirous of protesting against existing conditions, but is wishful not to damage herself while so doing.  The tourists, aided by half a dozen peasants, had dragged the driver out from beneath the heavy cart and had carried him to a pile of mucky straw beneath the eaves of a stable.  He was stretched full length on his back, senseless and deathly pale under the smeared grime on his face.  There was no blood; but inside his torn shirt his chest had a caved-in look, as though the ribs had been crushed flat, and he seemed not to breathe at all.  Only his fingers moved.  They kept twitching, as though his life was running out of him through his finger ends.  One felt that if he would but grip his hands he might stay its flight and hold it in.

Just as we jumped out of our carriage a young peasant woman, who had been bending over the injured man, set up a shrill outcry, which was instantly answered from behind us; and looking round we saw, running through the bare fields, a great, bulksome old woman, with her arms outspread and her face set in a tragic shape, shrieking as she sped toward us in her ungainly wallowing course.  She was the injured man’s mother, we judged—­or possibly his grandmother.