is office with a
very motherly anxiety, seated on the top of a high rotary table where
ordinarily the statuary worked at his carving, and pausing from time to
time, as it licked the boy's thick, black locks, to get the effect of
its labors. On other days or at other hours it slept under the
table-top, unvexed by the hammering that went on over its head. Even in
Rome, where cats are so abundant, it was a notable cat.

If you visit the Roman Forum in the morning you are only too apt to be
hurried home by remembrance of the lunch-hour. That, at any rate, was my
case, but I was not so hungry that I would not pause on my way hotelward
at what used to be the Temple of Vesta in my earlier time, but which, is
now superseded by the more authentic temple in the Forum. I had long
revered the first in its former quality, and I now paid it the tribute
of unwilling renunciation. It is so nearly a perfect relic of ancient
Rome and so much more impressive, in its all but unbroken peristyle,
than the later but recumbent claimant to its identity that I am sure the
owners of the little bronze or alabaster copies of it scattered over the
world must share my pious reluctance. The custodian is still very proud
of it, and would have lectured me upon it much longer than I let him; as
it was, he kept me while he could cast a blazing copy of the _Popolo
Romano_ into the cavernous crypt under it, apparently to show me how
deep it was. He may have had other reasons; but in any case I urge the
traveller to allow him to do it, for it costs no additional fee, and it
seems to do him so much good. If it is not very near lunch-time, let the
traveller look well about him in the dusty little piazza there, for the
Temple of Fortune, with its bruised but beautiful facade, is hard by, as
much in the form that Servius Tullius gave it as could well be expected
after all this time.

Perhaps the Circus of Marcellus is on the traveller's way home to lunch;
but he will always be passing the segment of its arcaded wall, filled in
with mediaeval masonry; and he need not stop, especially if he has his
cab by the hour, for there is nothing more to be seen of the circus. A
glimpse, through overhanging foliage, of the steps to the Campidoglio,
with Castor and Pollux beside their horses at top, may be a fortunate
accident of his course. If this happens it will help to rehabilitate for
him the Rome of the paganism to which these divinities remained true
through all tempt