In the very dawn of my recollections there is the memory of one of childhood’s long, long springs—when the days are all blue and silver overhead, and golden haze in the distance, and live emerald underfoot—when my old Maria used to convey me in the morning all the way from Villa Negroni on the Esquiline to Villa Borghese at Porta del Popolo, there to play in the grass till the sun began to sink towards St. Peter’s. I was three years old, and there was as yet no all-important baby brother to whose existence my own was to be subordinated a year later. Nobody had yet started to train and discipline me, and each sun that rose shone through just so many hours of Paradise. To Maria I was sun and moon, and if I was happy she was happy, but there was one occupation that kept her busy hour after hour in the distant villa, while I rolled on the grass—the picking of wild chicory for her supper salad. I can see her now, bent double, her good-natured dark face quite flushed with excitement as she pounced on the tender shoots that cropped up everywhere through the turf, till the red handkerchief in which she tied them up would hold no more, and she would slip it over her wrist, pick me up in her arms, and climb the tiers of the amphitheatre to reach our favourite luncheon room, a clear bubbling fountain in the avenue of ilex trees which crowned the ridge behind it. Here, close to the fountain, we had our midday meal, with the birds singing overhead and the wind dancing through the ilexes so that the ground was all a moving arabesque of sun and shade—the sweet fragrant ground that I could dig my fingers into to bring up handfuls of the gem-like ilex acorns that I loved so much. When the meal was over and my little silver mug had dipped up a drink for me from the fountain, I used to fall asleep in Maria’s arms to her queer lullabies—“Fringa, fringa!” or “Io vorrei ché alla luna ci s’andasse in carretella per védé le donne di lassù!” It always seemed to me that I woke up when she stopped singing, and I could not understand why Maria, with her head against a tree-trunk, was snoring happily and had to be waked up herself. But our sylvan siesta had lasted an hour or two; the sun was no longer overhead, but streaming in floods of level gold through all the lower branches, turning the turf and moss into live velvet, and flushing the statues’ pale cheeks to a semblance of life. Then, with many a halt for gathering anemones and violets, and some running away on my part to hide in the intricacies of the marble grottoes which burrow behind the rococo temple fountain at the first parting of the great avenue, we wandered towards the entrance, avoiding the avenue itself and threading our way through the little woods, till we came out by “Napoleon’s Tomb”—the exact copy of the original one at St. Helena, weeping willow and all—till the great iron gates came in sight, and we had to re-enter the city again. Sometimes Maria was