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Updated: June 6, 2025
The day passed quickly, and as he walked homeward again there stood that rotting church, and in his mind there rose a surging emotion larger than he could himself comprehend a desire to rebuild it by uniting the warring factions, of whose lack of Christianity it was fatal witness. Now this mystical thing happened.
The detachment was not for a few months, it was final. Her face was very wistful and her voice tremulous as she told me to go. "It is hard for me to leave you and sister," I replied, "but I must. I'm only rotting here. I'll come back at least to visit you."
Such was the case with the present prospect; years had passed since the axe had sapped the strength of the mighty oaks and beeches; bough after bough, and limb after limb, had fallen to the earth, with here and there some huge trunk itself, overthrown by the blast, and now rotting among weeds on the soil which it cumbered. At the present hour, the spectacle was peculiarly mournful and dreary.
There were overgrown clumps of aloes, with the bare skeletons of former flower-stalks standing erect among their dusky horns or lying rotting on the ground beside them. The place had evidently been intended for the culture of shrubbery and flowers, but the growth of the trees had long since so intercepted the sunlight and fresh air that not even grass could find root beneath their branches.
A mouldy pocket-book lay by his side and several postcards and a soiled photograph of a woman and a child. An attempt had been made to bury some of the dead, and several lay beneath heaps of loose earth with their boots projecting. But the rats had reached them all, and black, circular tunnels led down into the fetid depths of the rotting bodies.
And at any other hour of the day Leo XIII could not approach his window without beholding the abandoned houses for which all those brick-fields had worked, those houses which had died before they even lived, and where there was now nought but the swarming misery of Rome, rotting there like some decomposition of olden society.
The houses, or rather dwellings of these people, have been occasionally mentioned before: They are all built in the wood, between the sea and the mountains, and no more ground is cleared for each house, than just sufficient to prevent the dropping of the branches from rotting the thatch with which they are covered; from the house, therefore, the inhabitant steps immediately under the shade, which is the most delightful that can be imagined.
"Who's too old for games," suggested John. "Oh, there's always golf," said Peter. "A refuge for the aged, eh?" said John, and his eyes twinkled. "But Miss Sarah says you bid fair to beat her at croquet." "Oh, she was just rotting," said Peter; and the tone touched John, though he detested slang. "And what's croquet, after all, to a fellow that's used to exercise?
And at any other hour of the day Leo XIII could not approach his window without beholding the abandoned houses for which all those brick-fields had worked, those houses which had died before they even lived, and where there was now nought but the swarming misery of Rome, rotting there like some decomposition of olden society.
We saw numbers who might pass along our streets any day without being suspected of the taint. They had it, however, in one way or another. Sometimes on the extremities only, eating away the flesh and rotting the bones of the hands or feet; and sometimes only appearing in black and indurated spots on the skin, noticed only on a somewhat close examination.
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