Dangerous and unprofitable studies! Even at that tender age I
seem to have dimly discerned what I now know for certain: that dangerous
and unprofitable objects are alone worth pursuing. The taste for
minerals died out later, though I clung to it half-heartedly for a long
while, Dr. Johnston-Lavis, Professor Knop and others fanning the dying
embers. One day, all of a sudden, it was gone. I found myself riding
somewhere in Asiatic Turkey past a precipice streaked in alternate veins
of purest red and yellow jasper, with chalcedony in between: a discovery
which in former days would have made me half delirious with joy. It left
me cold. I did not even dismount to examine the site. "Farewell to
stones" I thought....
Often we lingered by the Fontana Trevi to watch the children disporting
themselves in the water and diving for pennies--a pretty scene which has
now been banished from the politer regions of Rome (the town has grown
painfully proper). There, at the foot of that weedy and vacuous and yet
charming old Neptune--how perfectly he suits his age!--there, if you
look, you will see certain gigantic leaves sculptured into the rock. I
once overheard a German she-tourist saying to her companion, as she
pointed to these things: "Ist doch sonderbar, wie das Wasser so die
Pflanzen versteinert." She thought they were natural plants petrified by
the water's action.
What happened yesterday was equally surprising. We were sitting at the
Arch of Constantine and I was telling my friend about the Coliseum hard
by and how, not long ago, it was a thicket of trees and flowers, looking
less like a ruin than some wooded mountain.
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