After the king and his ninespots had passed, dad said: “When you are in Rome, you must do as the Romans do,” and he said he wanted to get that heavy feeling off his shoulders, which he got at the religious procession, and wanted me to suggest something devilish that we could do, and I told him we better go and see the “Catacombs.” He wanted to know if it was anything like “a trip to Chinatown,” or the “Black Crook,” and I told him it was worse. Then he asked me if there was much low neck and long stockings in the “Catacombs,” and I told him there was a plenty, and he said he was just ripe to see that kind of a show, and so we took a carriage for the “Catacombs,” and dad could hardly keep still till we got there.
I suppose I ought to be killed for fooling dad, but he craved for excitement, and he got it. The “Catacombs” are where Roman citizens have been buried for thousands of years, in graves hewn out of solid rock, and they are petrified, and after they have laid in the graves for a few hundred years, the mummified bodies are taken out and stood up in corners, if the bodies will hang together, and if not the bones are piled up around for scenery.
We had to take torches to go in, and we wandered through corridors, gazing at the remains, until dad asked one of the men with us what it all meant, and the man said it was the greatest show on earth. Dad began to think he was nutty, and when I laughed, and said: “That is great,” and clapped my hands, and said: “Encore,” dad stopped and said: “Hennery, this is no leg show, this is a morgue,” but to cheer him up I told him his head must be wrong, and I pointed to about a hundred dried corpses, a thousand years old, in a corner, with grinning skulls all around, and told him that was the ballet, and told him to look at the leading dancer, and asked him if she wasn't a beaut, from Butte, Mont., and that killed dad. He leaned against me, and said his eyes must have gone back on him, because everything looked dead to him. I told him he would get over it after awhile, and to stay where he was while I went and spoke to one of the ballet that was beckoning to me, and I left him there, dazed, and went around a corner and hid.
People were coming along with torches all the time, looking at the catacombs and reading the inscriptions cut in the rock, and after awhile I went back to where I left dad, and he was gone, but after awhile I found him standing up with the stiffs. He was glad to see me, and wanted to know if I thought he was' dead. I told him I was sure he was alive, though he had a deathly look on his face.