r from the strange land
of sky-scratchers _(grattacieli),_ as the Italians not inadequately
translate sky-scrapers. If I would favor him through his back shop he
would show me how close I was upon it; and from his threshold he pointed
to the corner twenty yards off, which, when I had turned it, left me
almost at my own door.

In that transmuted Rome Via del Gambero, at least, was wholly unchanged,
and there was not a wrinkle in the front of the house where we had
sojourned so comfortably, so contentedly, in our incredible youth. I had
not quite the courage to ring and ask if we were at home; but, standing
across the way and looking up at the window, it seemed to me that I
might have seen my own young face peering out in a somewhat suspicious
question of the old eyes staring up so fixedly at it. Who was I, and
what was I doing there? Was I waiting, hanging idly about, to see the
Armenian archbishop coming to carry my other self in his red coach to
the Sistine Chapel, where we were to hear Pius IX. say mass? There was
no harm in my hanging about, but the street was narrow and there was a
chance of my being ground up by some passing cart against the wall there
behind me if I was not careful. I could not tell my proud young double
that we were one, and that I was going in the archbishop's red coach as
well; he would never have believed it of my gray hairs and sunken
figure. I could not even ask him what had become of the grocer near by,
whom I used to get some homely supplies of, perhaps eggs or oranges, or
the like, when I came out in the December mornings, and who, when I said
that it was very cold, would own that it was _un poco rigidetto,_ or a
little bit stiffish. The ice on the pavement, not clean-swept as now,
but slopped and frozen, had been witness of that; the ice was gone and
the grocer with it; and where really was I? At the window up there, or
leaning against the apse of the church opposite? What church was it,
anyway? I never knew; I never asked. Why should I insist upon a common
identity with a man of twenty-seven to whom my threescore and ten could
only bring perplexity, to say the least, and very likely vexation? I
went away from Via del Gambero, where the piety of the reader will seek
either of myselves in vain. In my earlier date one used to see the red
legs of the French soldiers about the Roman streets, and the fierce
faces of the French officers, fierce as if they felt themselves
wrongfully there and w