Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, 1899.

Sunday afternoon we went over to hear vespers at St. Peter’s (the music was Palestrina’s). The service was celebrated in the gorgeous Cappella del Coro. It must have been some especial festa, for the chapel was even more magnificent than usual, the priests wore extra fine flowered brocade robes, the air was bluer and heavier with incense, there were more candles. The slumbrous canons, in purple gowns and gray squirrel-skin capes, dozed in their fretted stalls. Over their heads, in the carved and gilded gallery, stood the choristers, two by two, each pair holding between them a quaint, black-lettered music book; behind the choir was the organ, in front, the leader, baton in hand. They all wore white lace-trimmed cottas over black gowns. Their voices, dominated by the piercing sweetness of the Pope’s angel, a male soprano, filled the chapel with an almost overpowering melody, that flowed through the gilded gates and floated out into the distant aisles and transepts of the great church.

Wandering about after service, we came upon the tomb of Palestrina, in the transept near the chapel where his magnificat had rung out so gloriously.

“The Church has a long memory for its saints, sinners, and master-workmen. If I thought it would remember me, now, I would take the vows to-morrow,” somebody said in my ear. It was Patsy.

“Jolly to think,” he went on, “of the old boy who led that choir and composed that music for ’em—he died, you know, in 1594,—lying here within the smell of the incense, within the sound of his own harmonics.” Patsy’s only instrument is the guitar.

“I like incense,” he went on; “the Roman populace smells no sweeter than in the days Shakespeare wrote about them; but the real value of incense, of course, lies in its being a germ destroyer, a safeguard to the priest. In the old days, when people did not know so much about health as they do now, they used to come to church to give thanks for recovery from smallpox while still in a state to give it to others.”

Here Helen came up. We had scarcely finished asking her news when Mr. Z—— joined us.

“Looking at the tomb of Palestrina?” he said. “That reminds me, would you ladies like to go and see the town from which he took his name? It is an opportunity, the greatest living authority on polygonal walls is going with us.”

“I never heard of a polygonal wall,” Helen began. (“You’d not give a hoot to see one,” murmured Patsy.) “But I would go anywhere for a day in the country this divine weather, provided the company was good.”

“And the luncheon,” Patsy put in.

Mr. Z—— smiled: “I think the ladies may trust me for that,” he said. Then he gave Helen and me directions for meeting at the station and left us.

“Z—— is a silly old gloat, but there is no malice in him,” Patsy said. “His Antonio is the best cook in Rome. It is part of the law of compensation that the biggest bores always have the best chefs.”

We had perfect weather for the trip to Palestrina. All the women, like Helen, had come for the day’s outing in the country, the men were grimly intent upon polygonal walls—all but one—Patsy, the uninvited, who turned up at the station and said he “would go along to have a try at the vino di paese and to see if the girls of Palestrina were as pretty as the girls of PrÆneste.” As we did not feel responsible for him (he is a relation of the Z——’s) we were thankful to see his handsome face. Express trains do not stop at Palestrina, so we had to take a local, which crawled. One does not mind crawling across the Campagna, in sight of the trees and tombs of the Via Appia, beside the long lines of brown aqueducts, broken here and there into picturesque groups of arches. As we approached the Alban hills we found a hazy scarf of pink gauze spread about their feet and half way up to their knees; on nearer view this proved to be fruit trees in blossom.

At the dull little station of Monte Compatri Colonna there was a delay. Patsy, in search of diversion, tried to get out of the carriage. The door was locked. He put a long leg out of the window and made as if he would climb out. Excitement among the peasants on the platform. Everybody talked at once. Four women and three men rushed to the window.

“Eccellenza, for charity’s sake, have patience! The door is capable of being opened!” urged the vendor of passa tempi (salted melon seeds).

An old woman, with a basket of assorted fruits, threw herself passionately in the breach.

“For the love of the Madonna, illustrissimo, have a care, you will do yourself an injury. The door opens, I assure you it is true. That ignorante of a guard. Where has he gone? The capo stazione himself should interest himself in your signoria.”

Patsy put out his head and one arm. The vendor of the straw-covered flasks of red and white wine joined the group.

“This is a serious affair, amici miei,” he said. “Signori, restrain the gentleman! Between ourselves now, is he mad? If so, my brother, who is of the carabinieri, can easily be summoned.”

Patsy by this time had got one shoulder out and was frantically waving an arm and a leg. That was too much for the immemorial beggar with the head and beard of Jove, who for forty years has sat upon that platform and begged. He laid down his tray of matches and hurried off on one leg and a crutch to the office of the capo stazione. Meanwhile, the guard came out of the restaurant furtively wiping his moustache. He rushed at the carriage with his key. Only one person on the platform had maintained his equilibrium,—the waiter from the restaurant, a man of the world, continued to walk calmly up and down the platform, offering his atrocious chiccory brew—he called it coffee—to the other passengers. He rather superciliously let us alone.

The guard hurried to the window. “I asked the signori before I allowed myself to attend to my duties at Colonna if any of the illustrious ones desired to descend. You yourself, excellency, assured me you desired nothing!” He fitted the key to the door as he spoke.

“Behold, did I not speak the truth?” said the fruit seller; “am I not right? the door opens.”

Patsy leaned comfortably back in the corner and lighted a cigarette. The capo stazione arrived, hastily buttoning his gold-laced coat. He looked daggers at the guard.

“What is wrong? If there has been any inattention it shall be reported. How is this? One of the travellers obliged to get out of the window, and now that the door is open nobody alights?”

“That gentleman,” said Patsy, nodding towards Mr. Z——, “wished to see if he could climb out of the window. Do not trouble yourselves, he is not mad, merely an original. So sorry you should have been disturbed.” The capo bowed politely to Patsy, fixed poor Z—— with a freezing stare, and returned with olympian dignity to that stuffy seat of authority, his office. The Jove-like beggar, leaning on his crutch, in his curiosity to see us forgot to beg.

“Un fiasco di vino!” said the wine seller, thrusting a flask into the carriage.

“Portugalli!” shrilled the old fruit woman.

“CaffÈ due soldi la tazza (Coffee two cents a cup)!” cried the waiter.

“Pronti (Ready)!” roared the guard.

“Taratara!” screamed the station master’s horn.

“Partenza!” and that was the last we saw of Monte Compatri Colonna.

Between Colonna and Palestrina Patsy allowed us to enjoy the view, really well worth seeing. We had enchanting glimpses of the Alban, Sabine, and Volscian mountains; the valleys between blazed with wild-flowers. At the station the party divided, Mr. Z——, the expert on polygonal walls, and the rest going in the stage, Patsy, Helen, and ourselves crowding into a botte.

“The trouble with those fellows is,” said Patsy, “that they know too much of one thing and too little of anything else. You’d be talked to death and sick of the subject if I had not come along to save your lives.”

“I should like to know what we have come to see,” I feebly protested.

“Nonsense,” said Helen, “they have crammed it all out of books, you can cram a great deal better afterwards. It takes the edge off to read too much about a thing before you see it. Don’t read the guide-book till you have seen the thing and got your own impression neat.”

The road from the station leads up a sharp incline, winding through the steep and dirty streets of Palestrina, a hillside town, which stands upon the ruins of the Colonna’s mediÆval stronghold, which again stands upon the ancient town of PrÆneste, extolled by the Latin poets. That PrÆneste, with its magnificent Temple of Fortune, the resort of the fashionable Romans of the days of MÆcenas, seems modern compared to the ancient PrÆneste, whose ruins are found beneath it, and whose arx was the spot chosen for the picnic luncheon. It was a stiff climb. We left the carriage at Castel San Pietro and scrambled to the summit where that magnificent and indomitable race—Castellane calls them the Italiotti—built their citadel. Here we saw the ruins of the polygonal (we used to call them cyclopean) walls. Astonishing structures, making the walls of the three later periods—the latest, exquisite brick-work of the Empire—seem by comparison like the work of children! The huge rocks are fitted together without cement of any sort, and in some places the walls look as solid as the day they were built, long before Rome was! To make room for our table-cloth, an old shepherd obligingly drove his sheep a little lower down the mountain. He was knitting stockings for one of his grandchildren; he has four to bring up. Their mother is dead, their father—he went years ago to Buenos Ayres—has ceased to write or to send them money.

A pretty girl spinning with a distaff asked shyly if she could help us. Patsy sent her for water while he set the table.

“We could not have her handling the food, you know,” he said; “but she is so decorative that we want to look at her while we eat and drink. Antonio has outdone himself (he knew I was coming), this ham really has been boiled in vino di Montefiascone, as I suggested. The girls of Palestrina are as handsome as the girls of PrÆneste.” Armida, our girl, had come back, a dripping conca poised on her head.

“How do you know so much about the girls of PrÆneste?” I asked.

“Go to the Kircheriano Museum and look at the Ficoronian Cista and you will know as much as I do,” Patsy confessed. “It was found near here in the necropolis. It is a green bronze toilet casket, with the most corking pictures from the story of the Argonauts engraved upon it you ever saw! Pollux has just licked Amycus, you know, for interfering with the Greeks preempting the spring of water, and tied him up to a tree, as he deserved. Then you have the Greeks drinking out of the spring. In the harbor lies the good ship Argo; on shore you see Jason and Hercules, one of the Argonauts in the attitude of boxing, a fat old Silenus mimicking him. Female beauty is represented by Athena and NikÉ, who seem to be offering a victor’s crown to the lucky Pollux. It’s up to date, I can tell you. The girls are no prettier than Armida there; but find me the man who can ‘do’ her like the fellow who engraved that Cista, and I will pay him to make her portrait!”

“How long ago was the casket made?” Helen asked.

“If you must have a date, 700 B.C. is as good as another. Heigh ho! The world’s grown lazy! All this talk about modern energy makes me tired! Where’s the energy in any race on earth to-day to build an arx like this? to live on the top of a steep hill like this? to trundle itself and its chattels up and down? Our civilization compared to PrÆneste’s is barbarism by every standard I know.”

“You don’t know much,” said Helen. “I know you have waited too long for your luncheon. Your views will improve directly.”

As we ate our luncheon, Armida awkwardly weaving a garland of oak leaves after a pattern Patsy made her, watched us with shy, hungry eyes. She and I exchanged glances (not a word was spoken) which said,—

“Signora, I have rarely tasted white bread—never such a pasticcio as the signorino is giving to the shepherd’s dog!”

“Figlia mia, all that remains of the feast shall be for you and the shepherd; you will divide with him?”

“Stia sicura (Rest assured)!” said Armida’s honest eyes.

There was wine in an amphora—how had Patsy managed it?—he poured the first glass on the ground in libation.

Looking at Armida and raising his glass, “Alle belle ragaze di Palestrina!” he said. The shepherd’s dog sniffed the spilt wine scornfully.

“Tutti gli Inglesi sono matti! (The English are all mad)!” muttered the shepherd.

Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, 1899.

June in Italy is heaven. The weather is delicious. Life is pleasant and calm. J. has found a small American ice-chest, the only one in Rome; we are as proud as peacocks about it; Pompilia shows it off as if it were the great kohinoor. It is an economy in ice, which has only lately been introduced, and is fabulously dear. Nena fetches a tiny slab of artificial ice every afternoon, it is wrapped in thick felt, put into the American ice-chest, where it keeps the milk and wine cool. Green nuts are part of the

summer bill of fare, fresh filberts in their jackets, green almonds and English walnuts as much nicer fresh than dried as fresh figs are better than dry, or grapes than raisins.

Ignazio, our gardener, handsome, sympathetic, with a timid laugh, a hesitating manner, a real passion for his calling, was recommended to us as knowing more about roses than any man in Rome. The burthen of caring for our beloved flowers had become too great. The improvement since the expert took hold and properly grafted our roses is astonishing. Ignazio has to be restrained from quite ruining us. To him the natural order would be to spend the greater part of one’s income upon one’s flowers—I am not so sure he is not right! For weeks he has been talking about a new rare flower—just the thing for the terrace—whose name he could not remember. When I asked him he took off his old cap, rubbed his head in a puzzled way, and complained that the English names were “too difficult.” I caught his enthusiasm, ordered some of these rare exotics, though the price was high. To-day arrived six fine specimens of the wild American purple aster, which overruns the fields and roadsides at home!

Signor Giacomo Boni, the architect in charge of the public buildings of ancient Rome, has a rival terrace on the roof of his house: we went to see his Japanese lilies the other day. Fancy, he has a cherry tree with ripe cherries on it, a peach tree with peaches, a tame starling in a cage, and quite the most wonderful collection of plants and flowers I ever saw in so small a space. Signor Boni has planted on the Palatine, in the Forum, and in the Baths of Caracalla, the flowers and shrubs mentioned in the classics as growing in those places. The good work is beginning to tell already; now there are roses and fleur-de-lis growing in the Forum. The vandalism which stripped the Colosseum of its glorious robe of flowered green and exposed its gaunt skeleton to view, is at an end, but the havoc it wrought is irreparable—at least in my lifetime. Fancy, there were five hundred different varieties of wild-flowers growing on that splendid old ruin. Many of these are unknown in other parts of Europe and are supposed to have sprung from seeds that were mixed in the various kinds of fodder imported from Africa to feed the wild beasts which fought in the old blood-soaked arena.

Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, August 3, 1899.

It was too hot for sleep last night, a rare thing in Rome. At half-past four this morning, when I went out on the terrace to water the plants, the smooth red tiles were still warm to bare feet. The Piazza of St. Peter’s was a sea of fog, out of which loomed the lantern of Angelo’s dome; no other part of the great church was visible. A white mist from the Tiber rose like a wall between us and Mt. Soracte; the river and the mountain Horace loved are still the dearest things in the wide view of the Roman landscape. When the plants had been watered it was half-past five, just the right time for bicycling, so we set out. At this hour few people are about, save the drivers of the heavy wains of hay—drawn by big, soft-eyed gray oxen with magnificent branching horns. These wagons of fragrant hay are not allowed in the streets after eight o’clock in the morning. Though the Forum was reached before six, Signor Boni and his aids were already hard at work. Swarms of men, like so many busy ants, were passing to and from the excavations, wheeling barrows full of earth, returning a little later with empty barrows.

“Where do you put the rubbish that you take out?” I asked. The capo smiled indulgently. “Every particle of the earth of the Forum is sacred,” he said. “We skim it off carefully in layers, keeping each layer quite separate from the others. Then we sift it layer by layer, sort whatever it contains, examine each bit of broken glass, metal, pottery, and, where it is possible, piece the fragments together.”

In a sacrificial layer, composed chiefly of the ashes and bones of victims offered at the altars of the gods, the capo lately found the jaw bones of several large dogs. These did not properly belong here, among the bones of beeves, sheep, and goats, the regulation sacrificial animals. The layer in which they were found proved to be of the time of Marcellus. Now, what were the bones of these big dogs doing there?

One dark night—it was in the days of Marcellus—the Goths descended for the first time upon Rome, the citadel came within an ace of being taken—would have been, but for the cackling of the silly geese which roused the sleeping guards. The silly geese became sacred geese, and the faithless watch-dogs, who had failed to bark and give the alarm, were slaughtered at the altar,—and that is how the big canine jaw bones turn up to-day in the sacrificial layer of Marcellus! The capo’s dreamy blue eyes, the eyes of an enthusiast, glowed with an inner light as he unfolded this theory. Imagination, you see, is as important to the successful archÆologist as it is to any other discoverer. He must have other things as well—a thorough knowledge of the classics, for instance. Did not Mme. Schlieman learn the whole of Homer by heart, to aid her husband in his search for the tomb of Agamemnon?

If in reading Tacitus or Livy the capo finds mention of a missing building or statue, he goes and looks for it in the place where according to the historians it ought to be—and where, nine times out of ten, he finds it! While he talked to us his eyes never left the skilful hands of a workman patiently matching together pieces of brown terra-cotta from a large pile of shards.

“If we could only make up one complete tile!” he sighed.

We were in the temporary museum where the latest “finds” of the Forum are kept. The man at the next table was putting together a really beautiful vessel of dark-blue glass. It might have been the Myrrhene goblet of Petronius!

“The tiles are so ugly, so monotonous—why should you care? I could understand, now, if a piece of that enchanting blue glass were missing!” I said.

“The cup is only a cup,—beautiful if you will,—but what does it teach us? nothing new. If we could find a whole tile, now, it would fix the date of a building we are in doubt about.”

Scientific methods, you see; even in Rome we cannot escape them! Then we went and looked at the spot where the Jewish citizens of Rome piously burned the body of Julius CÆsar, and at what remains of the house where CÆsar lived, a corner of the dining-room, with the white mosaic pavement, and a piece of wall painted with a decoration of fruit, flowers, green trees, and a pointed bamboo trellis, in the same style as the Villa Livia, built by the widow of Augustus, who, perhaps, had admired Aunt Calpurnia’s dining-room, and when her time came to build imitated it!

In the house of the Vestal Virgins we saw some fine pavements lately uncovered. Vesta is by far the most interesting of the Roman divinities. Is there a shrine to her at Radcliffe? There should be; we owe Rome the “higher education,” as we owe her the law we live by, the army we conquer by. Close to the Temple of Vesta we saw the place where earthquakes were foretold by the simplest contrivance. On a white marble platform finely adjusted weights were placed so as to oscillate with the first, otherwise imperceptible, tremors of the earth; in this way the knowing ones were enabled to foretell the earthquakes to the populace. Not far from here is the point where lightning once struck, making a hole ever after held sacred. It was turned into a sacred well, wherein jewels, cups, and other precious offerings were thrown by the devout or the superstitious. Both these shrines are very near the Temple of Vesta. Was it by chance that the fanes of the three things primitive man fears most, fire, earthquake, and lightning, should be so near together? The capo thinks not.

“Now come and see the Republican well I have just found,” he said, leading the way to a deep pit in the form of an amphora, with smooth rounded sides lined with cement.

“Notice the work they did in the days of the Republic; it is far better than the work of the Empire. See this cement, as perfect as the day it was laid.”

“What did you find in this well?” we asked.

“Come and see. Here are a great number of styluses—the Roman pens used for writing on wax tablets” (do you suppose some poor devil of a literary man threw them in in a moment of despair?) “and the entire contents of a Republican butcher’s shop. See, there is the great cleaver, these are the knives—even the wooden handles are intact. These round stones are the weights, here is the thigh bone of the last ox slaughtered before the shop came to grief, and here—take it carefully, it is of terra-cotta—is the butcher’s lamp. Do you make out the design? It is in the shape of an inflated oxhide.”

I never saw the like of that lamp! Of all the precious things the capo has unearthed, I most covet the Republican butcher’s squat little earthenware lamp with the neck of the skin pursed together to hold the wick.

“Now come and look at the true Via Sacra; you see it lies several feet below the road we used to call the Sacred Way. Do you observe how much finer this early pavement is than the later paving? But wait, I shall show you better yet,—the earlier the work, the better the workmanship.”

As we stood on the large squares of smooth gray stone, a cloud veiled the hot August sun, a shadow crossed the pavement. Might it not have been just here that Horace tacked to avoid meeting that bore Crispinus? When midsummer comes and everybody goes away, and there remains only Rome, ourselves, and the mighty ghosts,—these grow so real that I wonder if I dreamed the tea-party-picnicking Rome of winter and spring.

“Here is the Basilica Emilia. We should not have been able to excavate this if it had not been for Mr. St. Clair Baddeley, who raised the money in England to buy the land and indemnify the owners of the houses we were obliged to pull down. Look at these two delightful bas-reliefs; have you ever seen such a treatment of the acanthus?”

The reliefs are the most florid—one might almost say “baroque”—acanthus designs I have ever seen. In one the flower in the centre of the “curly cue” ends in a prancing horse; the other terminates in some apochryphal beast, like a dragon.

“Wait, wait till I make a copy of this adorable white and green pavement,” I cried. It was a geometrical design in Emilia’s Basilica. A design that I have never seen either in Egypt or Greece.

“For that you will not need me,” said the capo; “it is growing late and hot; now for the Lapis Niger!” Like a child he had kept the best of the feast for the last. As we went, I picked up a small piece of iridescent glass, opal, rose, and pearl, a bit of heaven’s rainbow dug from the “sacred earth.”

“What might this have been?” I asked.

“That we shall see, perhaps part of a tear bottle, perhaps a fragment of the vessel in which the vestals daily brought lustral water for the altars from the Fountain of Egeria!” Was he laughing at me?

I shall not forget the sensation produced by the first sight of the Lapis Niger, the black stone of the so-called tomb of Romulus. Whether the smooth slab of black marble actually covered the ashes of Romulus, or was a later monument put up to his memory, has not yet, I believe, been established. They do know that the inscription on the cippus beneath the stone is written in the most ancient Latin which has yet come to light—the epigraphists are still cracking their brains trying to read it. Is it not pleasant to have the sceptical German historians routed? To have our Romulus and Remus given back to us, our Tarquins, our Numa Pompilius, and Egeria? To tell the truth, I never gave them up, I always kept a sneaking belief in demigods and heroes, took Hawthorne’s word against the Teutons. Now I am being justified right and left. Boni finds the Tomb of Romulus in the Roman Forum, Dr. Evans finds the palace of Minos, and the labyrinth of the Minotaur in Crete.

To comfort-loving persons Rome is the most satisfactory place in the world for the study of man—from the savage of thirty centuries ago in his tree coffin, fished up from the bottom of Lake Trasimeno (now at the Museum Papa Giulio), to Victor Emmanuel in his tomb at the Pantheon. Think of it, the first king of Young Italy sleeping in a temple of Ancient Rome which has been in use ever since it was built in the year 27 B.C. Athens is a thousand times more beautiful than Rome, but to the ultra modern Greece seems on the outskirts of “to-day.” Here, here in Rome, we fancy we are in the midst of things, and creature comforts are still to be had, as in the days of Lucullus (I recommend you an omelette soufflÉe aux surprises À la Grand Hotel! Outside an ordinary hot soufflÉe—the surprise is the heart, cold sublimated chocolate ice-cream)!

Not long since, while lunching at that luxurious restaurant, we became aware of a personage at the next table. Everybody looked at him; it was impossible not to look at him. He was a large, masterful man with a high color, young gray hair, and a look of power I have not often met. We began to guess his nationality. I immediately claimed him. “He is an American, a Western senator, from Montana or Washington State.”

There was something large and dauntless about him, the free look of one coming from a young country.

“Please find out who that gentleman at the next table is?” our host said to the waiter.

The man seemed surprised at the question.

“That is Cecil Rhodes, sir,” he answered.

After that we could not help catching some of his talk—perhaps we did not try very hard—it was brilliant, exhilarating, and cordial. His guests were hardly more en rapport with him than the rest of us in the room. He was not unconscious that the people who sat near, the waiters, even the sphinx-like manager, hovering in the offing with impassive face, were thrilled by being in his company: nor could his attitude be called conscious. He merely seemed aware of us, could no more help dominating the chance crowd in a fashionable restaurant than his fellows in the Transvaal.

It happened that after lunch we took our friends “sightseeing” to the Kircheriano Museum, where we found one of the earliest Roman citizens and his wife, still lying side by side in the very earth the mourners threw over them, his rude stone weapons, her primitive household utensils close to their hands. There, you see, are the two ends of your chain of interest (there is not a missing link between),—the prehistoric man at the Kircheriano Museum and the man who is making history, Cecil Rhodes, on his way to South Africa, lunching at the Grand Hotel!