These remarks upon the skill of the gondoliers, and the ease and safety of the gondolas, remind me, by contrast, of the destructive bungling of a porter in Cologne, who undertook to cart a load of trunks and handbags and shawl-straps down from our hotel to the Rhine steamer, and who, in turning a corner on a down grade, made the turn too short, and hurled the whole lot of our belongings into the muddy street with such violence that many of them were defaced, some permanently damaged, and one valise broken to pieces and utterly ruined.
That German baby carriage had an exciting adventure also on the night of our arrival in Rome. As usual, it was made the apex of the pyramid of trunks and grip-sacks which constitute our sign manual, so to speak, on the top of every omnibus that takes us from the station to the hotel; but in this instance it was carelessly left untied, so that as we went steeply down one of the seven hills of Rome, the cart tumbled from its high perch to the stone-paved street, snapping off one of the handles, and suffering sundry other shattering experiences. A few days after we had the pleasure of paying a fraudulent cabinetmaker more for repairing it than it cost in the first instance. The Italian workmen and shopkeepers uniformly charge you more than their work and goods are worth. I think I have had more counterfeit money passed on me in the short time I have been in Italy than I have had in all the rest of my life before, and the very first swindle of this kind to which I was subjected was in a church, when the sacristan gave me a counterfeit two-franc piece in change as I paid the admission fees to see certain paintings and sculptures behind the high altar.
However, I am wandering from my subject; I may conclude my eulogy on the baby above mentioned by saying that, young as she is, she sits through the seventy or eighty minutes of the customary tedious European dinner almost as circumspectly as a graven image might, but reminding us of one of Raphael's cherubs in her blue-eyed combination of sweetness, archness and dignity.
Next time we will resume our account of matters of more general interest.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Relics in General, and the Iron Crown of Lombardy in Particular.
Rome, December 23, 1902.
I had heard of relics before. Years ago I had read Mark Twain's account of the large piece of the true cross which he had seen in a church in the Azores; and of another piece which he had seen in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, besides some nails of the true cross and a part of the crown of thorns; and of the marble chest in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo at Genoa, which he was told contained the ashes of St. John, and was wound about with the chain that had confined St. John when he was in prison; and of the interesting collection shown him in the Cathedral of Milan, including two of St. Paul's fingers and one of St. Peter's, a bone of Judas Iscariot (black, not white), and also bones of all the other disciples (presumably of the normal color), a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impression of his face, part of the crown of thorns, a fragment of the purple robe worn by Christ, a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by St. Luke, and a nail from the cross—adding in another place that he thought he had seen in all not less than a keg of these nails.