Status Updates From The Heart of Rome: A Tale o...

The Princess looked at his quiet face a moment in silence, and all that was best in her rose up through all that was artificial and worldly, and untruthful and vain. "I did not know that there were such men," she said simply.

Two skeletons lay at full length, face downwards as a drowned body always sinks at last when decay has done its loathsome work. A third lay on its side, in a frightful natural attitude, the skull a little raised up and resting against the cemented wall, the arms stretched out together, the hands clutching a rusty crowbar.

In nine cases out of ten it is the woman who enjoys the ecstatic delight of saying "I told you so", and there are plenty of women who would ask no greater joy in paradise than to say so to their husbands forever and ever. Indeed, eternal reward and punishment could thus be at once combined and distributed in a simple manner.

The "lost waters" of Rome are very mysterious. It appears in the most unexpected of places, sometimes in great quantities and seriously interfering with any attempt to lay the foundations of a new building, sometimes black and silent under a huge flagstone in an old courtyard, sometimes running with an audible rush through hidden passages deeper than the deepest cellars.