The sixth day of July closes the Octave of the 29th of June with a magnificent function, attended by the whole College of Cardinals, in the Church of St. John Lateran, the outpost of the Eternal City on its southern side. The Basilica faces in that direction and is the last building within the city walls, which still raise their crenellated barrier of Roman masonry between it and the Campagna beyond. This, the real approach to the Church, is very beautiful. The portico is surmounted by statues of the Apostles, which are visible from a great distance away on the Campagna, and is reached by a series of shallow marble steps, where, in my early days, many devout beggars were wont to sit and ask for alms. Below the steps and commanding a glorious view of the Campagna and its encircling hills, stretches a wide grassy terrace where we often walked up and down for a long time, at the end of an afternoon drive, thus following the example of many of the Popes, with whom this was a favourite spot, when in residence at the Lateran Palace. Distances are deceptive where spaces are so great; the grassy stretch never looked very vast; the feathery mulberry trees that grew under the old Aurelian wall seemed almost within reach; but in reality were quite a little way from the green terrace. The wall always fascinated me because of its crown of small loop-holed towers, set near together and connected by a covered way that still looked practicable enough, although I believe there was no mode of reaching it except by scrambling up from the outside. In those days the sturdy ruin was covered with wild flowers and creeping plants, the long garlands of yellow camomile waving like strings of stars in the wind, some lovely things, whose name I never knew, sending out arm-long shafts of pink and purple from every crevice, two or three live-oak saplings finding good root-hold on the top, and every foot of surface covered with the velvety jewelled leaves and tiny lilac flowers of another little old friend, which I think the wise men call the “parietary” and which I found, true to its name, clothing whole walls of our temple home in North China. There the blossoms were much larger, and during the stagnating days of one scorching summer I used to pass hours in the deep, damp court where they grew, and discovered (what I suppose any botanist could have told me) that their strange lucency comes from a sticky liquid effused over the petals, which themselves throw out a network of all but invisible hairs; that flies and gnats settle on these hairs, get caught by the treacherous gum—and then are quietly sucked in and devoured by the flower!