In front of the Ara Coeli I stood. A swarthy Italian was telling of the dramatic death of Cola di Rienzi. His English was lightly worn, but it seemed to please his audience, and it was for that purpose they had paid their lire. The crazy-quilt language of the cicerone and his audacious way of handling history, made him cut an attractive figure in the eyes of most tourists, whose desires are amusement rather than study. As a type, to use a phrase borrowed from the school of psychological novelism, he was a study. To the student Rome is a city of absorbing interest, to the ordinary American bird of passage a dull place. It all depends on your point of view. If you are a scholar, a collector of old lace, or a vandal, Rome is your happy hunting ground. If these pursuits do not interest you, Roman beggars with all sorts and conditions of diseases, sometimes by nature, mostly by art, Roman fleas, and the gaunt ghosts of the Campagna quickly drive you from the capital of the Cæsars and Popes. A few other annoyances might be added, such as sour wine, whose mist fumes are not to be shriven by your bottle-let of eau de Cologne, garlic on the fringe of decay, and the provoking smell of salt fish in the last stage of decomposition. But you have come to Rome; it is a name to conjure with, and despite the drawbacks, you must have a glimpse, an ordinary bowing acquaintance, with the famed old dame. At the office, an English office, in the Piazza di Spagna, you have asked for a “droll guide.” Who could listen to a scholarly one amid such active drawbacks as wine, fleas and fish? Michael Angelo Orazio Pantacci is your man. What do you care for good English? Did you not leave New York to leave it behind? What do you care for Roman history? Pantacci is your man, and his lecture on Cola di Rienzi is a masterpiece. A stranger joined our little crowd. Pantacci at that moment had attained his descriptive high-water mark. His pose and voice were touchingly dramatic. Cola was, as he expressed it, “to perish.” The stranger smiled and passed on. His smile was a composite affair. It was easy to see in it Michael Angelo’s historical duplicity and our ignorant simplicity. The stranger was tall, with the shoulders slightly stooping, a nose as near an approach to the Grecian as an American may come, a heavy black mustache, ruddy cheeks, that whispered of English food mellowed with the glowing Chianti. Who is that man? I said to my companion, whose eyes had followed the stranger rather than Pantacci. “That,” said he, “is Marion Crawford, the author of the Saracenesca books. You remember reading them at Albano.” Tell me something about him. He is a very clever man. Cola has perished; let us leave Pantacci. On the way to Cordietti’s tell me something of his life. He knows how to tell a story, an art hardly to be met with in contemporary fiction. Fiction has abrogated to herself the whole domain of life, and thus the art of telling a story for the story’s sake is lost.