findeth it not in the presence of couriers, cabmen, beggars, photograph-peddlers, stovepipe hats, tie-backs and bridal giggles? The dreamer thought to find old Rome crystallized amid its glorious memories. He finds a nineteenth-century city, with gay shops and fashionable streets, living over the heroic scenes of the ancients and the actual woe and spiritual mysticism of the mediaeval age; and he is disappointed--nay, even sometimes enraged into a gnashing of the teeth at all things Roman. But after many weeks, after the sights have been "done," the mouldy and mossy nooks of the old city explored, and the marvellous picturesqueness that hides in strange places revealed--after one has a speaking acquaintance with all the broken bits of old statues that gather moth and rust where the tourist cometh not and the guidebook is not known, and has followed the tiniest thread of legend or tradition into all manner of mysterious regions,--then the sentimentalist begins to love Rome again--Rome as it is, not Rome as it seemed through the glamours of individual imagination. This is what the Leatherstonepaughs did. But first they fled the companionship of the beloved but somewhat loudly-shrieking American eagle as that proud bird often appears in the hotels and _pensions_ of Europe, and lived in a shabby Roman palace, where only the soft bastard Latin was heard upon the stairs, and where, if any mediaeval ghost stalked in rusted armor or glided in mouldering cerements, it would not understand a single word of their foreign, many-consonanted speech. This palace stands, gay and grim, at the corner of a gay street and a dingy _vicolo_, the street and alley contrasting in color like a Claude Lorraine with a Nicholas Poussin. Past one side of the palace drifts all day a bright tide of foreign sightseers, prosperous Romans, gay models and flower-venders, handsome carriages, dark-eyed girls with their sallow chaperones, and olive-cheeked, huge-checked _jeunesse doree_, evidently seeking for pretty faces as for pearls of great price, as is the manner of the jeunesse doree of the Eternal City; while down upon the scene looks a succession of dwelling-houses, a gray-walled convent or two, one of the stateliest palaces of Rome--now let out in apartments and hiding in obscure rooms the last two impoverished descendants of a proud race that helped to impoverish Rome--one or two more prosperous palaces, and a venerable church, looking like a sleepy watchman of Zion suffering the enemy to do as it will before his closed eyes. [Illustration: WHAT A ROMAN BUYS FOR TWO CENTS IN THE ETERNAL CITY.] [Illustration: WHAT A FOREIGNER BUYS FOR TWO CENTS IN THE ETERNAL CITY.]