Perhaps it is true that the impressions which Rome makes upon a thoughtful man vary more according to the wind and the time of day than those he feels in other cities. Perhaps, too, there is no capital in all the world which has such contrasts to show within a mile of each other--one might almost say within a dozen steps. One of the most crowded thoroughfares of Rome, for instance, is the Via del Tritone, which is the only passage through the valley between the Pincian and the Quirinal hills, from the region of Piazza Colonna towards the railway station and the new quarter. During the busy hours of the day a carriage can rarely move through its narrower portions any faster than at a foot pace, and the insufficient pavements are thronged with pedestrians. In a measure, the Tritone in Rome corresponds to Galata bridge in Constantinople. In the course of the week most of the population of the city must have passed at least once through the crowded little street, which somehow in the rain of millions that lasted for two years, did not manage to attract to itself even the small sum which would have sufficed to widen it by a few yards. It is as though the contents of Rome were daily drawn through a keyhole. In the Tritone are to be seen magnificent equipages, jammed in the line between milk carts, omnibuses and dustmen's barrows, preceded by butcher's vans and followed by miserable cabs, smart dogcarts and high-wheeled country vehicles driven by rough, booted men wearing green-lined cloaks and looking like stage bandits; even saddle horses are led sometimes that way to save time; and on each side flow two streams of human beings of every type to be found between Porta Angelica and Porta San Giovanni. A prince of the Holy Roman Empire pushes past a troop of dirty school children, and is almost driven into an open barrel of salt codfish, in the door of a poor shop, by a black-faced charcoal man carrying a sack on his head more than half as high as himself. A party of jolly young German tourists in loose clothes, with red books in their hands, and their field-glasses hanging by straps across their shoulders, try to rid themselves of the flower-girls dressed in sham Sabine costumes, and utter exclamations of astonishment and admiration when they themselves are almost run down by a couple of the giant Royal Grenadiers, each six feet five or thereabouts, besides nine inches, or so, of crested helmet aloft, gorgeous, gigantic and spotless. Clerks by the dozen and liveried messengers of the ministries struggle in the press; ladies gather their skirts closely, and try to pick a dainty way where, indeed, there is nothing 'dain' (a word which Doctor Johnson confesses that he could not find in any dictionary, but which he thinks might be very useful); servant girls, smart children with nurses and hoops going up to the Pincio, black-browed washerwomen with big baskets of clothes on their heads, stumpy little infantry soldiers in grey uniforms, priests,