w sill, under her
nose, while her hands are both held over the charcoal fire that is
burning in it. If there were any proof needed that the idea of a future
punishment by fire did not originate in Rome, the best reply would be
the bitter hatred the Romans have of cold. I can fancy the income of the
church twice as large if they had only thought to have filled purgatory
with icebergs and a corresponding state of the thermometer. A Roman, in
winter time, would pay twice as many _baiocchi_ for prayers to get a
deceased friend out of the cold, as he could otherwise be induced to.
The English and other foreigners have, little by little, induced hotel
and boarding house keepers to introduce grates and stoves, with good
coal and wood fires, wherever they may hire lodgings; but the old Romans
still stand by braseras and scaldinas.'

'I caught a bad cold yesterday, thanks to this barbarous custom,' said
Caper. 'I was in the Vatican, looking at a pretty girl copying a head of
Raphael's, and depending on imagination and charcoal to warm me: the
results were chills and the snuffles.'

'Let that be a warning to you against entering art galleries during cold
weather. To visit the Borghese collection with the thermometer below
freezing point, and see all those semi-nude paintings, whether of saints
or sinners, chills the heart; not only that they have no clothes, but
that the artists who made the pictures were so radically vulgar--because
they were affected!'

'But,' spoke Caper,'they probably painted them in the merry spring time,
when they had forgotten all about frozen fountains and oranges iced; or,
it may be, in their day wood was cheaper than it is now, and money
plentier.'

'Yes, in the days when three million pilgrims visited Rome in a year.
But would you believe it? within thirty miles of this city I have seen
enough timber lying rotting on the ground, to half warm the Eternal
City? The country people, in the commune where I lived one summer, had
the privilege of gathering wood in the forest that crowns the range of
mountains backing up from the sea, and separating the Pontine Marshes
from the higher lands of the Campagna: but the trunks of the hewn trees,
after such light branches as the women could hack off were carried away,
were left to rot; for there was no way to get them to Rome--an hour's
distance by railroad. Cold? The Romans are numbed to the heart: wait
until they are warmed up; wait until they have a chance to