If, therefore, you have the slightest business across the city, you must walk the entire distance, or be borne in a litter or send a messenger--methods taking about equally long. As will be seen, even the use of horses and carriages is largely prohibited. Besides, the mild climate and method of building the houses compel people to spend a great fraction of their day in the streets, or in the public plazas and buildings. Human life teems everywhere. One is overwhelmed by the jostling multitudes even in the remoter quarters. Everything (including many personal acts which other ages keep in strict privacy) seems going on in public. There is, in fact, no city where it is easier to be “lost in a crowd” than in Rome; no city where the good and the bad, the divine and the bestial in humanity are so incessantly in evidence and in such abrupt contact. =4. The Country around Rome.=--Rome is some thirteen miles from the nearest seacoast, but the distance down the twisting “yellow” Tiber to Ostia (“River Mouth”) is nearly twice as great. The city itself lies near the northerly end of that broad plain later called the Campagna which stretches southeasterly for nearly seventy miles but whereof the width betwixt ocean and Apennines seldom exceeds twenty-five. Looking off from any of the heights of Rome towards the east, the whole horizon from north to south seems traced by a continuous chain of mountains about ten to twenty miles distant. Very beautiful they are when seen through a soft blue or golden haze beneath the Italian sky; and by facing straight north one can discover the round isolated peak of Mount Soracte (2420 feet high), made famous by the poets, near whose southeastern base the Tiber winds on its tortuous progress towards the sea. Then following the line of mountains southward one can notice the chain of the Sabine hills, some with peaked and lofty summits, and next is discovered the spot where the Tiber rests embosomed in its gray olive groves. More southward still are the hills on whose slopes rests “Cool Præneste,” and then, running over a horizon of four or five miles and ending in the plain, is beheld the noble form of Mount Albinus, the isolated volcanic peak sacred to the Latin Jupiter and at whose base by tradition lay Alba Longa, the parent town of Rome; after that the view takes in nothing but the undulating plain, which at length sinks off into the sea. [Illustration: Map of ROME in the Days of Hadrian about 135 A.D.]