“It is the most uncomfortable marble person in Rome,” she said of the _Moses_. “I always have a feeling that it is never quite still; that he has turned his face on being interrupted in something, as if he had been talking with God here alone, and were waiting for people to go and leave him to continue the conversation. He will watch us out the door, though. I wonder if he can see through the leathern curtain? Come, little girls, we are going.” Bianca had a rose in her belt, and, as the others walked slowly away, she slipped across the church and threw it inside the railing before the Blessed Sacrament, repeating from the Canticle of St. Francis of Assisi, which they had been reading with their Italian teacher the evening before: “Laudate sia il mio Signor per la nostra Madre terra, la quale Ci sostenta, e nudrisce col produrre Tanta diversità D’erba, di fiori e frutti.” “They speak of the Blessed Sacrament here as _Il Santissimo_,” she heard the Signora say when she joined them at the door. “It is beautiful; but I prefer the Spanish title of ‘His Majesty.’ One would like to be able to ask, on entering a church, ‘At which altar is His Majesty?’ It sounds like a live faith. Isn’t that palm beautiful? And do you see the ghost of Lucretia Borgia up in her balcony there? That is, or was, her balcony. Dear me! what an uncanny afternoon it is. I quite long to get among common people.” In fact, a solid post of snow-white cloud showed like a motionless figure over the balcony, changing neither shape nor position while they looked at it. There was, evidently, something behind worth seeing, and they took a carriage to the Janiculum for a better view. When they reached the parapet of San Pietro in Montorio, they saw the horizon beyond the city bound by a wonderful mountain-range――not the accustomed Sabine Apennines and Monte Cimino; these had disappeared, and over their places rose a solid magnificence of cloud that made the earth and sky look unstable. Ruby peaks splintered here and there against the blue in sharp pinnacles, their sides cleft into gorges of fine gold, their bases wrapped about with the motionless smoke and flame of a petrified conflagration. Beneath all were rough masses of uneasy darkness, in which could be seen faintly the throb of a pulse of fire. The royal progress had begun, and promised to be a costly one to some. The poor farmers would have to pay, at least. They leaned on the parapet, and took a new lesson in shape and color from the inexhaustible skies, and the Signora told them one of the many legends of the Janiculum.