To make myself understood I must explain.

I was in Rome. For ten days with a sirocco wind the rains had descended, as
surely they had never come down since the windows of heaven were opened at
the Flood. The Tiber rose thirty-two feet. Now Rome is tunnelled under the
streets with drains or sewers that carry all the refuse of a great city
into the Tiber. But, naturally, when the Tiber swells high above the crowns
of the sewers, they are choked. All the foulness of the great town is held
back under the houses and streets, and breeds gases loathsome to the nose
and noxious to life. Not only so, but a column of water, some twenty to
twenty-five feet in height, is acting like the piston of a pop-gun, and is
driving all the accumulated gases charged with the germs of typhoid fever
into every house which has communication with the sewers. There is no help
for it, the poisonous vapours _must_ be forced out of the drains and _must_
be forced into the houses. That is why, with a rise of the Tiber, typhoid
fever is certain to break out in Rome.

As I went over Ponte S. Angelo I was wont to look over the parapet at the
opening of the sewer that carried off the dregs of that portion of the
city where I was residing. One day I looked for it, and looked in vain.
The Tiber had swelled and was overflowing its banks, and for a week or
fortnight there could be no question, not a sewer in the vast city would
be free to do anything else but mischief. I did not go on to the Vatican
galleries that day. I could not have enjoyed the statues in the Braccio
Nuovo, nor the frescoes in the Loggia. I went home, found Messrs. Allen's
letter, packed my Gladstone bag, and bolted. I shall never learn who got
the microbe destined for me, which I dodged.

I went to Florence; at the inn where I put up--one genuinely Italian,