ls of box that inclose him and the glimpse of sky
overhead,--not precisely a cheering promenade. This is the Italian idea
of a garden. Much broken sculpture, weather-stained and defective, is
placed all along the way, and the perpetual Roman fountain is always
gushing somewhere.

[Illustration: VILLA MEDICI, ROME
_Page 134_]

Another phase of the Roman season may rise before one in the stately
beauty of any old historic palace, where the hostess, all grace and
sweetness, receives her guests in the apartment in which Galileo had
been confined when imprisoned in Rome. The approach to this _piano
nobile_ was up a flight of easily graded marble stairs, where in
frequent niches stood old statues. The large windows in the corridor on
the landing were curtained with pale yellow, thus creating a golden
light to fall on the old sculptured marbles. One salon was decorated
with Flaxman's drawings on the wall, in their classical outlines. From a
steep, dark stone stairway, down which one descended (at the imminent
risk of a broken neck in the darkness and from the irregular stairs
rudely carved in the stone), one emerged on a landing, where a little
door opened into the balcony of the chapel, a curious, gloomy place,
with tombs and altar and shrine, and some very poor old paintings. One's
progress to it recalled the lines from Poe's "Ulalume":--

"By a route, obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only."

Then, sitting in one of the richly decorated salons at afternoon tea in
this same old palace one day, while an accomplished harpist was
discoursing delicate music from its vibrating chords, flights of birds
kept passing a window, making a scene like that of a Wagner opera. The
groups present, largely of the Roman nobility, the titled aristocracy,
resembling so closely some of the old portraits in the palazzo that it
was easy to recognize that they were all one people, descendants of the
same race.

Many of the guests looked, indeed, as if they had stepped from out the
sumptuously carved frames on the wall. At these pretty festas one meets
much of the resident Roman world. The guests assembled seem to be
speaking in all the romance languages. There are Russian and Spanish as
well as Italian, French, German, and English at these alluring teas.
All the salons of the spacious apartments are thrown open, and the men
in their picturesque court dress or military costume, and the women and
girls in dai