As we approached Rome in the darkness I was on the qui vive for my first glimpse of it; and impatient with wonder as to what the morning would reveal. I was bound for the Hotel Continental--the abode, for the winter at least, of Barfleur’s mother, the widow of an Oxford don. I expected to encounter a severe and conservative lady of great erudition who would eye the foibles of Paris and Monte Carlo with severity. “My mother,” Barfleur said, “is a very conservative person. She is greatly concerned about me. When you see her, try to cheer her up, and give her a good report of me. I don’t doubt you will find her very interesting; and it is just possible that she will take a fancy to you. She is subject to violent likes and dislikes.” I fancied Mrs. Barfleur as a rather large woman with a smooth placid countenance, a severe intellectual eye that would see through all my shams and make-believes on the instant. It was midnight before the train arrived. It was raining; and as I pressed my nose to the window-pane viewing the beginning lamps, I saw streets and houses come into view--apartment houses, if you please, and street cars and electric arc-lights, and asphalt-paved streets, and a general atmosphere of modernity. We might have been entering Cleveland for any particular variation it presented. But just when I was commenting to myself on the strangeness of entering ancient Rome in a modern compartment car and of seeing box cars and engines, coal cars and flat cars loaded with heavy material, gathered on a score of parallel tracks, a touch of the ancient Rome came into view for an instant and was gone again in the dark and rain. It was an immense, desolate tomb, its arches flung heavenward in great curves, its rounded dome rent and jagged by time. Nothing but ancient Rome could have produced so imposing a ruin and it came over me in an instant, fresh and clear like an electric shock, like a dash of cold water, that this was truly all that was left of the might and glory of an older day. I recall now with delight the richness of that sensation. Rome that could build the walls and the baths in far Manchester and London, Rome that could occupy the Ile-St.-Louis in Paris as an outpost, that could erect the immense column to Augustus on the heights above Monte Carlo, Rome that could reach to the uppermost waters of the Nile and the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and rule, was around me. Here it was--the city to which St. Paul had been brought, where St. Peter had sat as the first father of the Church, where the first Latins had set up their shrine to Romulus and Remus, and worshiped the she-wolf that had nourished them. Yes, this was Rome, truly enough, in spite of the apartment houses and the street cars and the electric lights. I came into the great station at five minutes after twelve amid a clamor of Italian porters and a crowd of disembarking passengers. I made my way to the baggage-room, looking for a Cook’s guide to inquire my way to