and to forget for evermore,
while within the wondrous precincts, that aught more prosaic exists than
the heroes of history, the fairest visions of art and dreams of poesy.

[Illustration: "GHOSTS OF FLEAS" (Copied From Sketches Of William
Blake).]

So came the Leatherstonepaughs. And so have the Leatherstonepaughs
sometimes wondered if, after all, to come to Rome is not more of a loss
than a gain in the dimming of one of their fairest ideals. For is there
another city in the world where certain of the vulgar verities of life
press themselves more prominently into view than in the Eternal City?
Can one anywhere have a more forcible conviction that greasy cookery is
bile-provoking, and that it is because the sylvan bovine ruminates so
long upon the melancholy Campagna that one's dinners become such a heavy
and sorrowful matter in Rome? Is there any city in the universe where
fleas dwarf more colossally and fiendishly Blake's famous "ghosts" of
their kind? Does one anywhere come oftener in from wet streets, "a dem'd
moist, unpleasant body," to more tomblike rooms? Is one anywhere so
ceaselessly haunted by the disagreeable consciousness that one pays ten
times as much for everything one buys as a native pays, and that the
trousered descendant of the toga'd Roman regards the Western barbarian
as quite as much his legitimate prey as the barbarian's barelegged
ancestors were the prey of his forefathers before the tables of history
were turned, Rome fallen and breeches supplied to all the world? And are
any mortal vistas more gorgeously illuminated by the red guidebook of
the Tourist than are the stately and storied ruins where the
sentimentalist seeketh the brooding of a tender melancholy, and
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 bit