Forte Tiburtino is three miles beyond Rome on the road to Tivoli. The train is switched at the Portonaccio station to the rails of the tramway and goes directly to the gates of the hospital. It was the first day of autumn, the wind was blowing a gale, whereby the unfortunates arrived in a cloud of dust which must have added to their suffering. But that was as nothing, I fancy, compared with the pain and ignominy put upon them by the antics of one of my countrywomen clad in the uniform of an American relief organization, an affable Amazon who, approaching her physiological Rubicon, had begun to display somatically and emotionally the results of disturbance and inadequacy of those wondrous internal secretions that give elasticity to the skin, lustre to the hair, sparkle to the eye, and appearance of health to the _tout ensemble_. She but heightened her painful plainness by a stereotyped smile which, while displaying a row of long teeth, set at an obtuse angle, accentuated the aquilinity of her nose and the prognathousness of her jaw. Everywhere I looked she was there. Every place I went I heard her: "Bentornato," "Benvenuto," "Aspetti un memento, farò la sua fotografia." The ways of the Lord are obscure. Otherwise one could explain why he did not let these poor devils die without having thrust upon them this presence, voice, and affected cheer. I saw them, weak and prostrated as they were, shrink from her as one might shrink from a famished alligator. They opened the side doors of the cars and put steps against them; the white-clad orderlies came down first, and then began the procession of the weak, the emaciated, the forlorn, the desolate. Some were able to descend unaided, others had to be helped, one on either side, and still others dropped inert and corpse-like, across the strong back of an orderly who carried them the few feet to a stretcher. Now and then one would step out with an air of attempted jauntiness and a feeble smile, but for the most part it was a procession of those who had lost hope, who had abandoned faith in every one and everything, and who read over the portal, "_Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate_." It is some such procession that Dante must have encountered frequently in his passage through the infernal regions. "_Nulla speranza gli comforta mai nonchè di posa, ma di minor pena._" Not only did their faces reveal absolute despair but their bodies were reduced to such a state of emaciation that they were scarcely recognizable as human beings. Major Pohlmanti afterward told me that the majority of them had lost upward of forty per cent in weight, some of them, indeed, as much as sixty per cent. Many of them were so scantily clad that their chests and legs and arms were bare. Some were without socks, and their bony feet, thrust into cloth shoes with wooden soles, gave the finishing touch to what seemed to be animated skeletons covered with dirty brown paper which had been soaked in putrid oil.