t of the precious gallery. However, if I had any purpose of
visiting the Casino now, I put it aside, and contented myself with the
gentle sun, the gentle shade, and the sweet air, which might have had
less dust in it, breathing over grass as green in late January as in
early June. I did not care so much for a mounted corporal who was
jumping his horse over a two-foot barrier in the circular path rounding
between the Villa Borghese and the Pincian Hill, though his admirers
hung in rows on the rail beside it so thickly that I could hardly have
got a place to see him if I had tried. But there was room enough to the
fathers and mothers who had brought their children, and young lovers who
had brought each other for the afternoon's outing, just as the people in
Central Park do, and, no doubt, just as any Sunday crowd must do in the
planet Mars, if the inhabitants are human. There was a _vacherie_ nearby
where not many persons were drinking milk or even coffee; it is never
the notion of the Italians that amusement can be had only through the
purchase of refreshments.

[Illustration: 29 THE LITTLE STADIUM WITH ITS GRADINES]

I did not get as far as the Casino till the last Sunday of our Roman
stay, though we came again and again to the park (as we should call it,
rather than villa), sometimes to walk, sometimes to drive, and always to
rejoice in its loveliness. It was not now a very guarded, if once a very
studied, loveliness; not quite neglect, but a forgottenness to which it
took kindly, had fallen upon it; the drives seemed largely left to take
care of themselves, the walks were such as the frequenters chose to make
over the grass or through the woods; the buildings--the aviary, the
conservatory, the dairy, the stables--which formed part of the old
pleasance, stood about, as if in an absent-minded indifference to their
various roles. The weather had grown a little more wintry, or, at least,
autumnal, as the season advanced toward spring, and one day at the end
of February, when we were passing a woody hollow, the fallen leaves
stirred crisply with a sound like that of late October at home. We had
been at some pains and expense to put home four thousand miles away, but
this sound was the sweetest and dearest we had heard in Rome, and it
strangely attuned our spirits to the enjoyment of the fake antiquities,
the broken arches, pediments, columns, statues, which, in a region
glutted with ruin, the landscape architect of the Vil