ne's first Roman impressions confused with Emmeline
and magnesia and prickly heat; but Mrs. Malt appeared to think that Rome
attracted visitors chiefly by means of that American druggist. She said
she was perfectly certain we should find an American dentist there, too,
if we only took the time to look him up. I can't say whether she took
the time. We didn't.

It was interesting, the Piazza di Spagna, because that is where
everybody who has read "Roba di Roma" knows that the English and
Americans have lived ever since the days when dear old Mr. Story and the
rest used to coach it from Civita Vecchia--in hotels, and pensions, and
apartments, the people in Marion Crawford's novels. We could only decide
that the plain, severe, many-storied houses with the shops underneath
had charms inside to compensate for their outward lack. Not a tree
anywhere, not a scrap of grass, only the lava pavement, and the view of
the druggist's shop and the tourists' agency office. Miss Callis said
she didn't see why man should be for ever bound up with the vegetable
creation--it was like living in a perpetual salad--and was disposed to
defend the Piazza di Spagna at all points, it looked so nice and
expensive. But Miss Callis's tastes were very distinctly urban.

That druggist's establishment was on the Pincian Hill! It seemed, on
reflection, an outrage. We all looked about us, when we discovered
this, for the other six, and another of the foolish geographical
illusions of the school-room was shattered for each of us. The Rome of
my imagination was as distinctly seven-hilled as a quadruped is
four-legged, the Rome I saw had no eminences to speak of anywhere.
Perhaps, as poppa suggested, business had moved away from the hills and
we should find them in the suburbs, but this we were obliged to leave
unascertained.

Through the warm empty streets we drove and looked at Rome. It was
driving through time, through history, through art, and going backward.
And through the Christian religion, for we started where the pillar of
Pius IX., setting forth the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception,
reaffirmed a modern dogma of the great church across the Tiber; and we
rattled on past other and earlier memorials of that church thick-built
into the Middle Ages, and of the Early Fathers, and of the very
Apostles. All heaped and crowded and over-built, solid and ragged,
decaying and defying decay, clinging to her traditions with both hands,
old Rome jostled b