sheep whom he that day bears home on his shoulder rejoicing. It is well known that the officers encourage the men to attend to their religious duties at Easter, and remind them of these as the seasons come round. Every soldier may then have leave of absence for confession and communion, and a rule is made requiring all men out on leave in this way to bring back with them the Communion ticket which is given at the rails to each Easter communicant. Many of the soldiers choose to go to S. Peter's, and the carabineers in their sober black uniforms may always be seen there during Holy Week. It will readily be understood that both incongruities and accommodations are rife in such a condition of affairs as the existence of a State Church by the side of a hostile papacy. The King wants a regimental banner blest, or the Pope wants to have the roads kept while fifty thousand pilgrims flock to S. Peter's. During the latter years of Leo XIII.'s pontificate the Italian police were invited into the basilica, and headed a procession with all the decorum of its traditional vergers, the _Sampietrini_. These reciprocal interests even require telephonic communication between the Quirinal and the Vatican. In theory, the House of Savoy, the members of the Government and every person in its pay down to the _custodi_ of the ruins and museums of Rome with their families are excommunicated. In practice the Pope provides a chaplain for the Royal palace, the parish priest has of late years entered the Quirinal and penetrated to the royal bedrooms for the customary blessing of houses on Easter eve, Italian officials and their families receive absolution like any one else, and the irony of history required that the "excommunicated" Queen Margaret of Savoy was the only princely personage to fulfil the conditions of the last Jubilee year in Rome. [Illustration: FROM THE TERRACE OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN Before us is the church built on the site of the Temple of Venus and Rome and dedicated to S. Francesca Romana, the greatest of Roman saints. To the left the huge ruins of the basilica of the first Christian emperor, while to the right is the Arch of Titus, commemorating the fall of Jerusalem, and the road with its _via crucis_ which leads to the church of S. Bonaventura, the biographer of S. Francis, built against the Stadium of Domitian. The view is taken from the terrace outside that domestic basilica of the Flavian House which still retains more of the form of a Christian basilica than any other pagan building. Here are brought together the old and the new, Christian and pagan, papal and imperial--the shock of the two world empires. See interleaf, pages 44, 50.]