ations of
artists. Sometimes these artists had had a sublime disdain of base
lucre, and sometimes base lucre had had a sublime disdain of them. Some
of the latter class--whose name is Legion--had marked their passage by
busts, statuettes and paintings that served to remind Signora Anina,
their landlady, that promises of a remittance can be as fair and false
as the song of the Sirens or the guile of the Loreley. Crusaders in
armor brandished their lances there in evidence that Michael Angelo
Bivins never sent from Manhattan the bit of white paper to redeem them.
Antignone--usually wearing a Leatherstonepaugh bonnet--mourned that
Praxiteles Periwinkle faded out of the vistas of Rome to the banks of
the Thames without her. Dancing Floras seemed joyous that they had not
gone wandering among the Theban Colossi with Zefferino, instead of
staying to pay for his Roman lodging; while the walls smiled, wept,
simpered, threatened and gloomed with Madonnas, Dolorosas, Beatrices,
sprites, angels and fiends, the authors of whose being had long ago
drifted away on the ocean of poverty which sweeps about the world, and
beneath which sometimes the richest-freighted ships go down. In the
twenty years that Signora Anina has let her rooms to artists many such
tragedies have written significant and dreary lines upon her walls.

That studio-salon was rich not alone in painting and sculpture. The
whatnot was a museum whither might come the Northern Goth and Southern
Vandal to learn what a Roman home can teach of the artistic taste that
Matthew Arnold declares to be the natural heritage only of the nation
which rocked the cradle of the Renaissance when its old Romanesque and
Byzantine parents died. That whatnot was covered with tiny china dogs
and cats, such as we benighted American Goths buy for ten cents a dozen
to fill up the crevices in Billy's and Bobby's Christmas stockings.
Fancy inkstands stood cheek by jowl with wire flower-baskets that were
stuffed with crewel roses of such outrageous hues as would make the
Angel of Color blaspheme. Cut-glass spoon-holders kept in countenance
shining plated table-casters eternally and spotlessly divorced from the
purpose of their being. There were gaudy china vases by the dozen and
simpering china shepherdesses by the score. There were plaster casts of
the whole of Signora Anina's family of nine children, from the elder
fiery Achilles to the younger hysterical Niobe. There were
perfume-bottles enough