’sso.]
THE
photograph-peddlers, stovepipe hats, tie backs and bridal giggles? The dreamer thought to find old Rome crystallized amid its glorious memories. He finds a nineteenth-century city, with gay shops and fashionable streets, living over the heroic scenes of the ancients and the actual woe and spiritual mysti cism of the medizeval age; and he is dis appointed—nay, even sometimes enraged into a gnashing of the teeth at all things Roman. But after many weeks, after the sights have been "done," the mouldy and mossy
nooks of the old city explored, and the marvellous picturesqueness that hides in strange places revealed—after one has a speaking acquaintance with all the broken bits of old statues that gather moth and rust where the tourist cometh not and the
11
upon the scene looks a succession of dwelling-houses, a gray-walled convent or two, one of the stateliest palaces of Rome—now let out in apartments and hiding in obscure rooms the last two im poverished descendants of a proud race that helped to impoverish Rome—one or two more prosperous palaces, and a venerable church, looking like a sleepy watchman of Zion suffering the enemy to do as it will before his closed eyes. On the other side is the vicolo, dark
of wall and dank of pavement, with pet ticoats and shirts dangling from numer ous windows and fluttering like gibbeted
guidebook is not known, and has follow
ed the tiniest thread of legend or tradition into all manner of mysterious regions,— then the sentimentalist begins to love Rome again—Rome as it is, not Rome
as it seemed through the glamours of individual imagination. This is what the Leatherstonepaughs did. But first they fled the companion ship of the beloved but somewhat loudly shrieking American eagle as that proud bird often appears in the hotels and pen
WHAT
A
ROMAN
BUYS
FOR
TWO
CRNTS
IN
THR
RTRRNAL CITY.
sions of Europe, and lived in a shabby Roman palace, where only the soft bas
tard Latin was heard upon the stairs, and where, if any mediasval ghost stalked in rusted armor or glided in mouldering cerements, it would not understand a single word of their foreign, many-con sonanted speech. This palace stands, gay and grim, at the corner of a gay street and a dingy z/icolo, the street and alley contrasting in color like a Claude Lorraine with a Nich olas Poussin. Past one side of the pal ace drifts all day a bright tide of foreign sightseers, prosperous Romans, gay mod els and flower-venders, handsome car
riages, dark-eyed girls with their sallow chaperones, and olive-cheeked, huge checked jeunesse dorée, evidently seek ing for pretty faces as for pearls of great price, as is the manner of the jeunesse dorée of the Eternal City; while down
‘VIIAT A PORBIGNBR BUYS FOR TWO CRNTS IN THR ETRRNAL CITY.
wretches in the air; with frowzy women sewing or knitting in the sombre door ways and squalid urchins screaming ev erywhere; with humble vegetables and cheap wines exposed for sale in dirty windows; with usually a carriage or two undergoing a washing at some stable door; and with almost always an am orous Romeo or two from some bright er region wandering hopefully to and fro amid the unpicturesque gloom of this Roman lane to catch a wafted kiss or a dropped letter from the rear window of his Juliet's home. For nowhere else in Europe, Asia, America, the Oceanic Archipelago or the Better Land can the Romeo-and-Juliet business be more open
