way through the city to the
black dungeons of Sant' Angelo beyond the rushing river.

[Illustration: SAN GIOVANNI IN LATERANO]

It seems far away. Yet we who have seen the Roman people rise, overlaid
with burdens and maddened by the news of a horrible defeat, can guess at
what it must have been. Those who saw the sea of murderous pale faces,
and heard the deep cry, 'Death to Crispi,' go howling and echoing
through the city can guess what that must have been a thousand years
ago, and many another night since then, when the Romans were roused and
there was a smell of blood in the air.

But today there is peace in the great Mother of Churches, with an
atmosphere of solemn rest that one may not breathe in Saint Peter's nor
perhaps anywhere else in Rome within consecrated walls. There is mystery
in the enormous pillars that answer back the softest whispered word from
niche to niche across the silent aisle; there is simplicity and dignity
of peace in the lofty nave, far down and out of jarring distance from
the over-gorgeous splendour of the modern transept. In Holy Week,
towards evening at the Tenebrae, the divine tenor voice of Padre
Giovanni, monk and singer, soft as a summer night, clear as a silver
bell, touching as sadness itself, used to float through the dim air with
a ring of Heaven in it, full of that strange fatefulness that followed
his short life, till he died, nearly twenty years ago, foully poisoned
by a layman singer in envy of a gift not matched in the memory of man.

Sometimes, if one wanders upward towards the Monti when the moon is
high, a far-off voice rings through the quiet air--one of those voices
which hardly ever find their way to the theatre nowadays, and which,
perhaps, would not satisfy the nervous taste of our Wagnerian times.
Perhaps it sounds better in the moonlight, in those lonely, echoing
streets, than it would on the stage. At all events, it is beautiful as
one hears it, clear, strong, natural, ringing. It belongs to the place
and hour, as the humming of honey bees to a field of flowers at noon, or
the desolate moaning of the tide to a lonely ocean coast at night. It is
not an exaggeration, nor a mere bit of ill nature, to say that there are
thousands of fastidiously cultivated people today who would think it all
theatrical in the extreme, and would be inclined to despise their own
taste if they felt a secret pleasure in the scene and the song. But in
Rome even such as they might condes