Mrs. Barfleur had kindly volunteered to show me about this first day, and I was to meet her promptly at ten in the lobby. She wanted me to take a street car to begin with, because there was one that went direct to St. Peter’s along the Via Nazionale, and because there were so many things she could show me that way. We went out into the public square which adjoined the hotel and there it was that she pointed out the Museo delle Terme, located in the ancient baths of Diocletian, and assured me that the fragments of wall that I saw jutting out from between buildings in one or two places dated from the Roman Empire. The fragment of the wall of Servius Tullius which we encountered in the Via Nazionale dates from 578 B. C., and the baths of Diocletian, so close to the hotel, from 303 A. D. The large ruin that I had seen the night before on entering the city was a temple to Minerva Medica, dating from about 250 A. D. I shall never forget my sensation on seeing modern stores--drug stores, tobacco stores, book stores, all with bright clean windows, adjoining these very ancient ruins. It was something for the first time to see a fresh, well-dressed modern throng going about its morning’s business amid these rude suggestions of a very ancient life. Nearly all the traces of ancient Rome, however, were apparently obliterated, and you saw only busy, up-to-date thoroughfares, with street cars, shops, and a gay metropolitan life generally. I have to smile when I think that I mistook a section of the old wall of Servius Tullius for the remnants of a warehouse which had recently been removed. All the time in Rome I kept suffering this impression--that I was looking at something which had only recently been torn down, when as a matter of fact I was looking at the earlier or later walls of the ancient city or the remnants of famous temples and baths. This particular street car line on which we were riding was a revelation in its way, for it was full of black-frocked priests in shovel hats, monks in brown cowls and sandals, and Americans and English old maids in spectacles who carried their Baedekers with severe primness and who were, like ourselves, bound for the Vatican. The conductors, it struck me, were a trifle more civil than the American brand, but not much; and the native passengers were a better type of Italian than we usually see in America. I sighted the Italian policeman at different points along the way--not unlike the Parisian gendarme in his high cap and short cape. The most striking characteristic, however, was the great number of priests and soldiers who were much more numerous than policemen and taxi drivers in New York. It seemed to me that on this very first morning I saw bands of priests going to and fro in all directions, but, for the rest of it, Rome was not unlike Monte Carlo and Paris combined, only that its streets were comparatively narrow and its colors high.