school-girl order; that it is, indeed, of the same kind and class with
that which leads an otherwise honest person to steal a rag from a famous
battle flag, a leaf from a historical laurel wreath, or even to cut a
signature or a title-page from a precious volume; but with me the
feeling has never taken this turn, else I should never have confessed to
the possession of it. Whatever may be said or believed, however, I must
refer to it in more or less comprehensible terms, because it may explain
the conditions, although it will not unveil the causes, of the incidents
I am about to describe with all honesty and frankness.

Nearly twenty years ago I made my first visit to Rome, long before it
became the centre of the commercial and political activity of Italy, and
while it was yet unspoiled for the antiquarian, the student, the artist,
and the traveller. Never shall I forget the first few hours I spent
wandering aimlessly through the streets, so far as I then knew a total
stranger in the city, with no distinct plan of remaining there, and with
only the slight and imperfect knowledge of the place that one gains from
the ordinary travellers' descriptions. The streets, the houses, the
people, the strange sounds and stranger sights, the life so entirely
different from what I had hitherto seen, all this interested me greatly.
Far more powerful and far more vivid and lasting, however, was the
impression of an inconceivable number of presences--I hesitate to call
them spirits--not visible, of course, nor tangible, but still oppressing
me mentally and morally, exactly the same as my physical self is often
crushed and overpowered in a great assembly of people. I walked about,
visited the cafes and concert halls, and tried in various ways to shake
off the uncomfortable feeling of ghostly company, but was unsuccessful,
and went to my lodgings much depressed and nervous. I took my note-book,
and wrote in it: "Rome has been too much lived in. Among the multitude
of the dead there is no room for the living." It seemed then a foolish
memorandum to write, and now, as I look at the half-effaced pencil
lines, I wonder why I was not ashamed to write it. Yet there it is
before me, a witness to my sensations at the time, and the scrawl has
even now the power to bring up to me an unpleasantly vivid memory of
that first evening in Rome.

After a few days passed in visiting the galleries and the regular sights
of the town, I began to look for a st