forget that it ever was burnt! Darning and patching came to the women naturally, I suppose, seeing that the chief industry of the Ghetto consists in mending old clothes and selling them for new. Pius IX set the Jews free from all the old humiliating restrictions of their life in Rome, but until the Ghetto was swept away by the present Government, they clung to it tenaciously, and no wonder, for it was their very own, a little fortress of Jewry where no Christian ever came to disturb them, either at work or worship. With the inherited aversion and all the old traditions strong in us, we children of Rome never set foot there more than once or twice in all our lives. Our home was at the other end of the city, on the noble heights of the Esquiline, and almost all that we loved best grouped itself in that quarter. I have the most delightful recollections of the walk from Santa Maria Maggiore, our own Church, to the great free spaces round the Lateran. The last part of the way led through the Via San Giovanni, on the right side of which were scarcely any buildings at all, but only a long wall overhung, in the late spring, with masses of yellow Banksia roses, their trailing wreaths hanging so near our heads that we had but to spring and snatch to carry away big handfuls of the flowers, and what flowers! Yard-long arcs of ruffled honey tossed up against that Roman blue, every petal of the million a wing of translucent gold in sun and breeze; no stem, no foliage visible through the crowded blooms, except where the trailers tapered to the last tiny cluster of unopened buds, set like yellow pearls in the green calix, tapered to a point so delicate that the faintest breath would set them waving and quivering as if mad to burst their bonds and flutter in the sunshine like the rest. And their perfume, that perfume of warm wax, the purest and sweetest in this world, filled the whole street—not altogether honestly perhaps, for, by a rare harmony of the eternal fitness of things, the long wall on which they grew sheltered, in the middle of a beautiful garden, a wax factory where Church candles of every size were made, from the four-foot pillar, painted like a missal, that serves for the Paschal candle in Church, to the slim taper that the poorest could buy to light before the picture of their patron saint. It was worth while to be young, with every sense unspoiled, and to go dancing along that road on a summer afternoon; to stop where a low gateway led into the hidden garden and buy from the gardener’s wife some of her fat bunches of red carnations and lavender, for the sake of the Blessed St. John, whose especial flowers they are—also the cones of lavender made by tying a bundle just below the flowers, then turning the stalks back over these and tying them again to form an egg-shaped casket from which nothing could escape, and within which the flowers themselves could crumble to fragrant dust that would keep your