I did not know, then, that the chanting
was the voicing of good, honest, Bible-derived prayers; I thought it
was child's play, useless and fascinating. In the churches the
chanting monks and boys impressed me differently. Who does not feel,
without a word to reveal the fact, the wondrous virtue of Catholic
religious observance in the churches? The holiness of these regions
sent through me waves of peace. I stepped softly past the old men and
women who knelt upon the pavements, and gazed longingly upon their
simpler spiritual plane; I drew back reluctantly from the only garden
where the Cross is planted in visible, reverential substance. For the
year ensuing this life in Rome, I entertained the family with dramatic
imitations of religious chants, grumbling out at sundown the low,
ominous echoings of the priests, answered by the treble, rapid and
trustful, of the little choristers, gladly picturing to myself as I
did so the winding processions in St. Peter's.
In the square beneath our windows, during Lent, booths were set, and
countless flat pancake-looking pieces of dough were caught up by a
white-capped and aproned cook, with a long-handled spoon, and fried in
olive oil placed in a caldron at the booth's door, to be served to
passers in the twinkling of an eye. I watched this process until I
grew to regard Lent as a tiresome custom. Having tested the cakes, I
found them to be indistinct in taste, for all their pretty buff tint,
and the dexterous twist of the cook's wrist as he dumped them and
picked them up.
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