"It is a wonderful city," he said. "What tales those old walls could tell!" As they crossed the River Tiber he heard Edith murmur behind him, "Oh, Tiber, Father Tiber, to whom the Romans pray!" and then it seemed but a moment before they were rolling through a massive stone gateway, and the chauffeur had taken the wheel. As Rafael lifted his eyes to look about him once more, they looked straight into the eyes of a man who was riding in the opposite direction, and he smiled. He did not know that he had smiled, nor that this man was the king of Italy. His thoughts were back again with the conquerors of the early days, and the splendors of the ancient city. But the king had noticed the boy, and turned to look after him. "That was the spirit of the old Romans looking from his eyes," he said to his attendant. The last rays of the setting sun fell upon the scarred columns of the ruined Forum, as the car rounded the base of the Capitoline Hill and stopped at the spot where the Golden Milestone once marked the beginning of the Roman roads. Rafael was speechless; but Edith took the olive wreath from the hamper with exclamations of delight. "Where will you have it?" she asked the chauffeur, "on your head or your wheel?" "It belongs to the car triumphal," he answered as they turned and moved cautiously through the street-car tracks of modern Rome. "There could never have been such a record run made by your kings and emperors of olden times," said the girl proudly to Rafael. But he was too happy with his thoughts to make any reply, and Edith turned her attention to the conversation between her mother and the chauffeur. "To the Continental Hotel," Mrs. Sprague was saying, and all too soon they had crossed the city, and were welcomed and given rooms in the hotel. The chauffeur bade them good-bye, and their Marathon run was a thing of the past. CHAPTER XIII A RAMBLE IN ROME "Did you see a picturesque-looking shepherd, dressed in shaggy skins, driving his flock through the square at midnight?" Rafael asked the question at the breakfast table one morning, about two weeks after their arrival in Rome. "No, indeed!" Edith answered. "I was fast asleep. How could you see what he wore?" "It was bright moonlight," Rafael told her in reply. "I could see plainly his sheepskin jacket and the long hair of his goatskin leggins. He had a great white dog to help him guide the sheep, and they entered the square and passed through it so silently that it seemed almost like a dream." "Perhaps it was a dream," said Edith; but Rafael shook his head, and the girl went on, "Now I had a dream about the geese that saved Rome; but you will no doubt tell me that if I had looked out of the window I should have seen them following old Mother Goose through the square." Rafael laughed. "I do not know your old Mother Goose," he said, and left the table to telephone for the guide who was to take them to see some of the famous ruins of ancient Rome.