s of old statues that gather moth
and rust where the tourist cometh not and the guidebook is not known,
and has followed 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
companionship of the beloved but somewhat loudly-shrieking American
eagle as that proud bird often appears in the hotels and _pensions_ of
Europe, and lived in a shabby Roman palace, where only the soft bastard
Latin was heard upon the stairs, and where, if any mediaeval ghost
stalked in rusted armor or glided in mouldering cerements, it would not
understand a single word of their foreign, many-consonanted speech.

This palace stands, gay and grim, at the corner of a gay street and a
dingy _vicolo_, the street and alley contrasting in color like a Claude
Lorraine with a Nicholas Poussin. Past one side of the palace drifts all
day a bright tide of foreign sightseers, prosperous Romans, gay models
and flower-venders, handsome carriages, dark-eyed girls with their
sallow chaperones, and olive-cheeked, huge-checked _jeunesse doree_,
evidently seeking for pretty faces as for pearls of great price, as is
the manner of the jeunesse doree of the Eternal City; while down 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 impoverished 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.

[Illustration: WHAT A ROMAN BUYS FOR TWO CENTS IN THE ETERNAL CITY.]

[Illustration: WHAT A FOREIGNER BUYS FOR TWO CENTS IN THE ETERNAL CITY.]

On the other side is the vicolo, dark of wall and dank of pavement, with
petticoats and shirts dangling from numerous windows and fluttering like
gibbeted wretches in the air; with frowzy women sewing or knitting in
the sombre doorways and squalid urchins screaming everywhere; 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 amorous Romeo or two from some brighter region
wandering h