, and except in the steam-heated
hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the
churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but,
if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting
you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined
overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with
fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is
the Italian winter as advertised--that is, if you are a wanderer and a
stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door
warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than
ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against
shivering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you
impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you
select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn
till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the
padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for
closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I
should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and
mostly rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I remember was a
legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen
dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of
twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate.

XII. SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES

It had seemed to me that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so
dear to foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of
patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining in
their landaus and shielding their complexions from the November suns of
the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the period. In the doubt
which attends all recollections of the past, after age renders us
uncertain of the present, I hastened on my second Sunday at Rome in
February, 1908, to enjoy this vision, if possible. I found the Pincio
unexpectedly near; I found the sunshine; I found the familiar winter
warmth which in Southern climates is so unlike the summer warmth in
ours; but the drive which I had remembered as a long ellipse had
narrowed to a little circle, where one could not have driven round
faster than a slow trot without danger of vertigo. I did not find that
series of apparent principessa