me
bright afternoon, and notes how the avenue between the beautiful old
villas is also bordered by many vacant lots advertised for sale as well
as built up with pleasant new houses, he will be able to carry away with
him the significant fact that a convenient and public-spirited
trolley-line has the same suburban effect in Rome, Italy, as in Rome,
New York. If he meets some squadrons of cavalry or some regiments of
foot, in that military necessity of constant movement which the civilian
can never understand, he may make the useful reflection that it is much
better to have the troops out of the city than in it, and he can praise
the wisdom of the Italian government accordingly. On the neighboring
mountains the presence or absence of snow forms the difference between
summer and winter in Rome, and will suggest the question whether, after
all, our one continental weather is better than the many local weathers
of Europe; and perhaps he will acquire national modesty in owning that
there is something more picturesque in the indications of those azure or
silvery tops than in his morning paper's announcement that there is or
is not a lower pressure in the region of the lakes.

At any rate, I would not have him note the intimations of such a drive
at less worth than those of any more conventional fact of his Roman
sojourn. If one is quite honest, or merely as honest as one may be with
safety, one will often own to one's self that something merely
incidental to one's purpose, in visiting this memorable place or that,
was of greater charm and greater value than the fulfilment of a direct
purpose. One happy morning I went, being in the vicinity, to renew the
acquaintance with the Tarpeian Rock, which I had hastened to make on my
first visit to Rome. I had then found it so far from such a frightfully
precipitous height as I had led myself to expect that I came away and
rather mocked it in print. But now, possibly because the years had
moderated all my expectations in life, I thought the Tarpeian Rock very
respectably steep and quite impressively lofty; either the houses at its
foot had sunk with their chimneys and balconies, or the rock had risen,
so that one could no longer be hurled from it with impunity. We looked
at it from an arbor of the lovely little garden which we were let into
beyond the top of the rock, and which was the pleasance of some sort of
hospital. I think there were probably flowers there, since it was a
garden,