He took the corner that had been his favorite before, in the black shadow cast by a thick-leaved grapevine, and perching on the edge of the wall, looked down meditatively on the city as he filled his pipe. Well, so here he was in Rome--just as if something had pushed him here, where least of all places he had expected to find himself again. Odd that his year of travel should end with a second visit to the first European city that had stirred his imagination, that had given him a hint of what it was he had come to Europe to see. It was during his first stay in Rome that he stopped being a dumb, Baedecker-driven tourist, that he first got the idea of what Europe might teach him better than America could. It was here that he first thought of trying to get from Europe some idea of what men during a good many centuries had found worth doing. For, unlike America, Europe was crammed full of objects little and big that men alone or in groups had devoted their lives to create. America had tried a number of experiments--once; but Europe had tried them all, so many times, at such different periods, in so many, so various centers of civilization! Such a crowded graveyard of human endeavor might perhaps suggest a satisfactory motive (if one existed) for going on living. For a long time he had made no headway, had discovered no general underlying motive--indeed much of what he saw filled him with utter astonishment at the things men had cared for, even to the point of giving their lives to win them. He still remembered that morning during his first stay, when he had stared with stupefaction at the rows of portrait-busts in the Capitoline Museum. So many men, most of them apparently intelligent had schemed and plotted through long years--and what for? To be the conventional head of an unworkable Empire, top-heavy with administration; to endure the hideous tedium of ceremony and pompous ritual which the office had imposed; to be forced to work through sycophants and grafters, to be exiled from healthy human life into a region where in the nature of things you could never hope to see one spontaneous sincere expression on any human face; where your life, your work, your reputation hung on the whim of the Praetorian Guard or the disgruntled legions on a distant frontier--why, if you lay awake nights you couldn't think of a more thankless job than being a Roman Emperor! And yet for centuries men had sacrificed their friends, their honor, their very lives to hold the office. Those old Romans, for all they looked so like ordinary everyday men you meet in the street, must have had a queer notion of what was worth-while in life!