From these excursions into the ideal I would return to out-of-doors with another inexhaustible zest. That ardent, blue Roman sky and penetrating, soft sunshine filled me with life and joy. The breath and strength of immeasurable antiquity emanated from those massive ruins, which time could deface but never conquer. Emerald lizards basked on the hot walls; flowers grew in the old crevices; butterflies floated round them; they were haunted by spirits of heroes. There is nothing else to be compared with the private, intimate, human, yet sublimated affection which these antique monuments wrought in me. They were my mighty brothers, condescending to my boyish thoughts and fancies, smiling upon me, welcoming me, conscious of my love for them. Each ruin had its separate individuality for me, so that to-day I must play with the Coliseum, to-morrow with the Forum, or the far-ranging arches of the Aqueduct, or the Temple of Vesta. Always, too, my eyes were alert for treasures in the old Roman soil, coming, as it seemed, direct from the dead hands of the vanished people into mine. I valued the scraps that I picked up thus more than anything to be bought in shops or seen in museums. These bits of tinted marble had felt the touch of real Romans; their feet had trodden on them, on them their arms had rested, their hands had grasped them. Two thousand years had dulled the polish of their surfaces; I took them to the stone-workers, who made them glow and bloom again--yellow, red, black, green, white. They were good-natured but careless men, those marble-polishers, and would sometimes lose my precious relics, and when I called for them would say, every day, "Domane--domane," or try to put me off with some substitute--as if a boy could be deceived in such a matter! I once found in the neighborhood of a recent excavation a semi-transparent tourmaline of a cool green hue when held to the light; it had once been set in the ring of some Roman beauty. It had, from long abiding in the earth, that wonderful iridescent surface which ancient glass acquires. Rose, my sister, picked up out of a rubbish heap a little bronze statuette, hardly three inches high, but, as experts said, of the best artistic period. Such things made our Roman history books seem like a tale of yesterday, or they transported us back across the centuries, so that we trod in the footsteps of those who had been but a moment before us.