We reached Rome on Christmas Eve. The Corso was crowded with gaily dressed people. In a narrow side street a group of _piffarari_ from the hills, clad like satyrs in shaggy goat skins, stood playing their pipes before a dimly lighted shrine of Mary and the Child. It was so cold in the streets that we were glad to lift the padded leathern curtain and enter the Church of St. Peter’s, sweet with the smell of incense, bright with its scores of golden lamps. The basilica was filled with people waiting for the midnight mass. A long line stood before the statue of St. Peter; each in his turn wiped the bronze toe of the saint, kissed it, wiped it again, and passed on. Just before twelve o’clock several couples came in together, the men in evening dress wearing orders, the women in ball gowns sparkling with jewels. As they passed the holy water basin, a young officer dipped his fingers and offered them to a girl in a scarlet cloak who lightly touched the gloved finger tips and crossed herself. I caught a word of their talk. “You promised me that last dance.” “I could not help it--Paulo was watching--you shall have the next.” The gay company sweeps on and is lost in the vast throng of worshipers. The mass bell tinkles, all drop to their knees, heads are bowed, the silence almost hurts! Christmas morning we lingered over the breakfast table till Marion Crawford routed us out, crying: “Time to get ready for church--don’t be late! I am going to sing ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’ before the sermon.” Both Crawfords and Terrys were Protestants at this time; later Marion and two of his sisters “went over to Rome.” At the American Church in the Via Nazionale we found a meager congregation and a colorless service, compared to midnight mass at St. Peter’s. Doctor Nevin, the Nimrod rector, did his best for his flock, but the odds against him were heavy. “Did you notice,” Crawford murmured maliciously, “how the Reverend says, ‘Our Father who art in Nevin’?” Palazzo Odescalchi stands on the Piazza SS. Apostoli, near the Palazzo Venezia, then the Austrian embassy. The Prince, my aunt’s landlord, occupied one floor of his palace, renting the other apartments. My room was part of a ballroom suite. It had a high vaulted ceiling and walls covered with Nile-green silk painted in arabesques with lunettes of fruit, flowers, and landscape. My aunt kept open house; one met many of the prominent people of the day in her salon. Looking back, I seem to see it like one of Paul Veronese’s pictures, crowded with vivid and elegant figures. Scraps of gossip forty years old drift back to me. “Here comes the most beautiful woman in Rome,” some one whispers as both doors of the salon are thrown open and Giuseppe, the old majordomo, announces, “Marchesa Theodoli.” “Yesterday a workman said to her in the street, ‘Are you the Madonna herself or one of the angels?’--An American? Oh, yes! Lily Conrad,--her face was her fortune, Theodoli married her without a _dot_.” “No wonder!”