spected that no lordly race, from
father's father to son's son, had ever dwelt in their immense palace.
They suspected rather that it was, like many another mighty Roman pile,
reared by plebeian gains to shelter noble Romans fair and proud whom
Fate confined to economical "flats," and whose wounded pride could best
be poulticed by the word _palazzo_.

Hans Christian Andersen knew this palace well, and has described it as
the early home of his _Improvisatore_. In those days two fountains
tinkled, one within, the other just outside, the dusky iron-barred
basement. One fountain, however, has ceased to flow, and now if a
passer-by peeps in at the grated window, whence issue hot strong vapors
and bursts of merry laughter, he will see a huge stone basin into whose
foaming contents one fountain drips, and over which a dozen washerwomen
bend and pound with all their might and main in a bit of chiaroscuro
that reminds one of Correggio.

Over this Correggio glimpse wide stone stairs lead past dungeon-like
doors up five flights to the skylighted roof. Each of these doors has a
tiny opening through which gleams a watchful eye and comes the sound of
the inevitable "_Chi e?_" whenever the doorbell rings, as if each comer
were an armed marauder strayed down from the Middle Ages, who must be
well reconnoitred before the fortress-gates are unbarred.

[Illustration: THE COURT OF THE LEATHERSTONEPAUGHS' PALACE.]

It was in the _ultimo piano_ that the Leatherstonepaughs pitched their
lodge in a vast wilderness of colorful tiled roofs, moss-grown and
lichen-laden, amid a forest of quaintly-shaped and smokeless chimneys.
Their floors, guiltless of rugs or carpets, were of earthen tiles and
worn into hollows where the feet of the palace-dwellers passed oftenest
to and fro. A multitude of undraped windows opened like doors upon stone
balconies, whither the inhabitants flew like a startled covey of birds
every time the king and queen drove by in the street below, and upon
which they passed always from room to room. The outer balcony looks down
upon the Piazza Barberini and its famous Spouting Triton, with an
horizon-line over the roofs broken by gloomy stone-pines and cypresses
that seem to have grown from the buried griefs of Rome's dead centuries.
The inner balcony overlooks the court, where through the wide windows of
every story, amid the potted plants and climbing vines that never take
on a shade of pallor in an Italian winter, and that