ied as high as was intended, and even roofed in, suggesting
skeletons or empty cages. Then there were houses finished excepting that
their walls had not been plastered, others which had been left without
window frames, shutters, or doors; others, again, which had their doors
and shutters, but were nailed up like coffins with not a soul inside
them; and yet others which were partly, and in a few cases fully,
inhabited--animated by the most unexpected of populations. And no words
could describe the fearful mournfulness of that City of the Sleeping
Beauty, hushed into mortal slumber before it had even lived, lying
annihilated beneath the heavy sun pending an awakening which, likely
enough, would never come.

Following his companion, Pierre walked along the broad, deserted streets,
where all was still as in a cemetery. Not a vehicle nor a pedestrian
passed by. Some streets had no foot ways; weeds were covering the unpaved
roads, turning them once more into fields; and yet there were temporary
gas lamps, mere leaden pipes bound to poles, which had been there for
years. To avoid payment of the door and window tax, the house owners had
generally closed all apertures with planks; while some houses, of which
little had been built, were surrounded by high palings for fear lest
their cellars should become the dens of all the bandits of the district.
But the most painful sight of all was that of the young ruins, the proud,
lofty structures, which, although unfinished, were already cracking on
all sides, and required the support of an intricate arrangement of
timbers to prevent them from falling in dust upon the ground. A pang came
to one's heart as though one was in a city which some scourge had
depopulated--pestilence, war, or bombardment, of which these gaping
carcases seem to retain the mark. Then at the thought that this was
abortment, not death--that destruction would complete its work before the
dreamt-of, vainly awaited denizens would bring life to the still-born
houses, one's melancholy deepened to hopeless discouragement. And at each
corner, moreover, there was the frightful irony of the magnificent marble
slabs which bore the names of the streets, illustrious historical names,
Gracchus, Scipio, Pliny, Pompey, Julius Caesar, blazing forth on those
unfinished, crumbling walls like a buffet dealt by the Past to modern
incompetency.

Then Pierre was once more struck by this truth--that whosoever possesses
Rome is consumed by