marble heads, faces which stimulate his fancy or fit the names of heroes already known to him. In the centre of the garden stands an obelisk the history of which brings back the memory of a beautiful pagan youth who lived more than eighteen hundred years ago, and of another story of Old Nile, more pitiful, if less important, than the story of Moses. This is the obelisk which the Emperor Hadrian and his Empress Sabina raised to the memory of their beloved Antinous--the most beautiful youth the world has record of--who drowned himself in the Egyptian river, under the impression that his voluntary death would avert calamity from his benefactor the Emperor. After all these eighteen hundred years it is still possible to feel the passion of Hadrian’s grief. His biographer calls it “feminine”! But the gifted Emperor, lover of all things beautiful in art and nature, and a student of men and character, understood the value of his treasure and knew full well the irreparableness of his loss. He brought back to Rome all that was left of that beauty--an urnful of ashes--and placed it in the Emperor’s own tomb, now called the Castle of St. Angelo; and on the _spina_ of the circus by the tomb, Hadrian and Sabina erected this obelisk whose hieroglyphics, only quite recently deciphered, relate the deification of their favorite and give the information concerning his place of burial. The obelisk must have been removed by a later Emperor, probably Heliogabalus, for it was found in 1570, near Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, in the gardens of the Varian family, to which family that Emperor belonged. Bernini, in the century following its discovery, moved it to the Barberini Palace, which he was erecting and beautifying for the Barberini Pope, Urban VIII. Later on, a Princess Barberini presented it to Pope Pius VI, who set it up in the Giardino della Pigna in the Vatican, that temporary resting-place for so many treasures, and finally, in 1822, Pius VII and Valadier erected it where it now stands in full view of Hadrian’s Tomb, they being quite unconscious, however, that there was any connection between it and that great mausoleum. Not far from the fountain of Moses stand two umbrella-pines, their great boles shooting high up through all the foliage about. A hundred years ago they marked the exit into a side lane from the vineyard where they had been planted, for until that time these Gardens of the Pincio had been for centuries the vineyard belonging to the Augustinian monks of Santa Maria del Popolo, the same order from which, about 1494, young Cardinal Farnese bought the property by the Tiber, on which he built the Farnese Palace.