But with the night (as I wrote some years ago) the snow vanished and the sun emerged. We ran east to one balcony, and saw the light blazing on the Alban lake, and had but to cross the apartment to find ourselves, on the other side, with all the Campagna at our feet, sparkling in a thousand colors to the sea. And outside was the garden, with its lemon-trees growing in vast jars--like the jars of Knossos--but marked with Barberini bees; its white and red camellias be-carpeting the soft grass with their fallen petals; its dark and tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our feet; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun, open, too, to white, nibbling goats, and wandering _bambini_; its magical glimpse of St. Peter's to the north, through a notch in a group of stone-pines; and, last and best, its marvelous terrace that roofed a crypto-porticus of the old villa, whence the whole vast landscape, from Ostia and the mountains of Viterbo to the Circæan promontory, might be discerned, where one might sit and watch the sunsets burn in scarlet and purple down through the wide west into the shining bosom of the Tyrrhenian sea. And in one day we had made a home out of what seemed a desert. Books had been unpacked, flowers had been brought in, the stoves were made to burn, the hard chairs and sofas had been twisted and turned into something more human and sociable, and we had begun to realize that we were, after all, singularly fortunate mortals, put in possession for three months--at the most moderate of rents!--of as much Italian beauty, antiquity, and romance as any covetous soul could hope for--with Rome at our gates, and leisurely time for quiet work. Our earliest guest was Henry James, and never did I see Henry James in a happier light. A new light, too. For here, in this Italian country, and in the Eternal City, the man whom I had so far mainly known as a Londoner was far more at home than I; and I realized, perhaps more fully than ever before, the extraordinary range of his knowledge and sympathies.