There was nothing we could do for the human victim.  Our guides, having questioned the assembled natives, told us there was no hospital to which he might be taken and that a neighborhood physician had already been sent for.  So, having no desire to look on the grief of his mother—­if she was his mother—­a young Austrian and I turned our attention to the neglected mule.  We felt that we could at least render a little first aid there.  We had our pocket-knives out and were slashing away at the twisted maze of ropes and straps that bound the brute down between the shafts, when a particularly shrill chorus of shrieks checked us.  We stood up and faced about, figuring that the poor devil on the muck heap had died and that his people were bemoaning his death.  That was not it at all.  The entire group, including the fat old woman, were screaming at us and shaking their clenched fists at us, warning us not to damage that harness with our knives.  Feeling ran high, and threatened to run higher.

So, having no desire to be mobbed on the spot, we desisted and put up our knives; and after a while we got back into our carriage and drove on, leaving the capsized mule still belly-up in the debris, lashing out carefully with her skinned legs at the trappings that bound her; and the driver was still prone on the dunghill, with his fingers twitching more feebly now, as though the life had almost entirely fled out of him—­a grim little tragedy set in the edge of a wide and aching desolation!  We never found out his name or learned how he fared—­whether he lived or died, and if he died how long he lived before he died.  It is a puzzle which will always lie unanswered at the back of my mind, and I know that in odd moments it will return to torment me.  I will bet one thing, though—­nobody else tried to cut that mule out of her harness.

In the chill late afternoon of a Roman day the guides brought us back to the city and took us down into the Roman Forum, which is in a hollow instead of being up on a hill as most folks imagine it to be until they go to Rome and see it; and we finished up the day at the Golden House of Nero, hard by the vast ruins of the Coliseum.  We had already visited the Forum once; so this time we did not stay long; just long enough for some ambitious pickpocket to get a wallet out of my hip pocket while I was pushing forward with a flock of other human sheep for a better look at the ruined portico wherein Mark Antony stood when he delivered his justly popular funeral oration over the body of the murdered Caesar.  I never did admire the character of Mark Antony with any degree of extravagance, and since this experience I have felt actually bitter toward him.