[Illustration: It brought on a revolution 227]
Say, I sat on a bench in a plaza with a girl about my age, for an hour, while the other girls and boys sat on the ground and looked at us in admiration, and when I put my arm around her and kissed her on her pouting lips, it brought on a revolution. An Italian soldier policeman took me by the neck and threw me across the street, the girl scratched me with her finger nails and bit me, and yelled some grand hailing sign of distress, her brother and a ragged boy that was in love with the girl and was jealous, drew daggers, and the whole crowd yelled murder, and I started for our hotel on a run, and the whole population of Rome seemed to follow me, and I might as well have been a negro accused of crime in the states. I thought they would burn me at the stake, but dad came out of the hotel and threw a handful of small change into the crowd, and it was all off.
After they picked up the coin they beckoned me to come out and play some more, but not any more for little Hennery. I have been in love in all countries where we have traveled, and in all languages, but this Italian love takes the whole bakery, and I do not go around any more without a chaperone. The girls are ragged and wear shawls over their heads, and there are holes in their dresses and their skin isn't white, like American girls', but is what they call olive complexion, like stuffed olives you buy in bottles, stuffed with cayenne pepper, but the girls are just like the cayenne pepper, so warm that you want to throw water on yourself after they have touched you. Gee, but I wouldn't want to live in a climate where girls were a torrid zone, 'cause I should melt, like an icicle that drops in a stove, and makes steam and blows up the whole house.
Well, old man, you talk about churches, but you don't know anything about it. Dad and I went to St. Peter's in Rome, and it is the grandest thing in the world. Say, the Congregational church at home, which we thought so grand, could be put in one little corner of St. Peter's, and would look like 30 cents. St. Peter's covers ground about half a mile square, and when you go inside and look at grown people on the other side of it, they look like flies, and the organ is as big as a block of buildings in Chicago, and when they blow it you think the last day has come, and yet the music-is as sweet as a melodeon, and makes you want to get down on your knees with all the thousands of good Christians of Italy, and confess that you are a fraud that ought to be arrested.