cing
in the most flashy of ties and smoking the blackest and longest of long
black cigars. During twenty hours out of the twenty-four the gates of
the city roared with traffic. From all parts of the country labourers
poured in, bundle in hand and tools on shoulder to join in the enormous
work and earn their share of the pay that was distributed so liberally.
A certain man who believed in himself stood up and said that Rome was
becoming one of the greatest of cities, and he smacked his lips and said
that he had done it, and that the Triple Alliance was a goose which
would lay many golden eggs. The believing bulls roared everything away
before them, opposition, objections, financial experience, and the
vanquished bears hibernated in secret places, sucking their paws and
wondering what, in the name of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, would happen
next. Distinguished men wrote pamphlets in the most distinguished
language to prove that wealth was a baby capable of being hatched
artificially and brought up by hand. Every unmarried swain who could
find a bride, married her forthwith; those who could not followed the
advice of an illustrious poet and, being over-anxious to take wives,
took those of others. Everybody was decorated. It positively rained
decorations and hailed grand crosses and enough commanders' ribbons were
reeled out to have hanged half the population. The periodical attempt to
revive the defunct carnival in the Corso was made, and the yet unburied
corpse of ancient gaiety was taken out and painted, and gorgeously
arrayed, and propped up in its seat to be a posthumous terror to its
enemies, like the dead Cid. Society danced frantically and did all those
things which it ought not to have done--and added a few more,
unconsciously imitating Pico della Mirandola.

Even those comparatively few families who, like the Saracinesca, had
scornfully declined to dabble in the whirlpool of affairs, did not by
any means refuse to dance to the music of success which filled the city
with, such enchanting strains. The Princess Befana rose from her
deathbed with more than usual vivacity and went to the length of opening
her palace on two evenings in two successive weeks, to the intense
delight of her gay and youthful heirs, who earnestly hoped that the
excitement might kill her at last, and kill her beyond resurrection this
time. But they were disappointed. She still dies periodically in winter
and blooms out again in spring with the