ataclysmal changes had
passed over Rome since my time that I was, as far as concerned my own
consciousness, practically of the period of the Pantheon, say. The
Pantheon, in fact, was among my first associations with Rome. I lodged
very near it, in the next piazza, so that, if we were not
contemporaries, we were companions, and I could not go out of my hotel
to look up a more permanent sojourn without passing by it. Perhaps I
wished to pass by it, and might really have found my way to the Corso
without the Pantheon's help.

I have no longer a definite idea why I should have made my sojourn in
the very simple and modest little street called Via del Gambero, which
runs along behind the Corso apparently till it gets tired and then
stops. But very possibly it was because the Via del Gambero was so
simple and modest that I chose it as the measure of my means; or
possibly I may have heard of the apartment I took in it from wayfarers
passing through Venice, where I then lived, and able to commend it from
their own experience of it; people in that kind day used to do such
things. However it was, I took the apartment, and found it, though
small, apt for me, as Ariosto said of his house, and I dwelt in it with
my family a month or more in great comfort and content. In fact, it
seemed to us the pleasantest apartment in Rome, where the apartments of
passing strangers were not so proud under Pius IX. as they are under
Victor Emmanuel III. I do not know why it should have been called the
Street of the Lobster, but it may have been in an obscure play of the
fancy with the notion of a backward gait in it that I came to believe
that, in the many improvements which had befallen Rome, Via del Gambero
had disappeared. Destroyed, some traveller from antique lands had told
me, I dare say; obliterated, wiped out by the march of municipal
progress. At any rate, I had so long resigned the hope of revisiting the
quiet scene that when I revisited Rome last winter, after the flight of
ages, and one day found myself in a shop on the Corso, it was from
something like a hardy irony that I asked the shopman if a street called
Via del Gambero still existed in that neighborhood. I said that I had
once lodged in it forty-odd years before; but I believed it had been
demolished. Not at all, the shopman said; it was just behind his place;
and what was the number of the house? I told him, and he laughed for joy
in being able to do me a pleasure; me, a strange