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. 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.