For the first five or six days thereafter I went about with a certain Signor Tanni who was delivering peripatetic lectures at the principal places of interest in Rome. This is a curious development of the modern city, for so numerous are the travelers and so great their interest in the history of Rome that they gladly pay the three to twelve lire each, which is charged by the various lecturers for their discussions and near-by trips. There was a Nashville, Tennessee, chicken-and-egg merchant who, with his wife, was staying at our hotel and who was making the matter of seeing Rome quite as much of a business as that of chickens and eggs in Tennessee. He was a man of medium height, dark, pale, neat, and possessed of that innate courtesy, reserve, large-minded fairness and lively appreciation--within set convictions--which is so characteristic of the native, reasonably successful American. We are such innocent, pure-minded Greeks--most of us Americans. In the face of such tawdry vulgarity and vileness as comprises the underworld café life of Paris, or before such a spectacle of accentuated craft, lust, brutality, and greed as that presented by the Borgias, a man such as my chicken-merchant friend, or any other American of his type, of whom there are millions, would find himself utterly nonplused. It would be so much beyond his ken, or intention, that I question whether he would see or understand it at all if it were taking place before his very eyes. There is something so childlike and pure about the attitude of many strong, able Americans that I marvel sometimes that they do as well as they do. Perhaps their very innocence is their salvation. I could not have told this chicken-merchant and his wife, for instance, anything of the subtleties of the underworld of Paris and Monte Carlo as I encountered them; and if I had he would not have believed me, he would have recoiled from it all as a burned child would recoil from fire. He was as simple and interesting and practical as a man could be, and yet so thoroughly efficient that at the age of forty-five he had laid by a competence and was off on a three years’ tour of the world.