between America and Europe. It is one of
infinitely greater importance to establish the truth and enlarge the
possibility of direct communication with the world of higher forces and
larger attainment and scope than our own. This communication exists and
has always existed, but it has been regarded as myth and legend and
phenomenon rather than as a fact of nature whose laws were to be
ascertained and understood. It must be made clear as an absolute
scientific demonstration that the change of form by the process we call
death does not put an end to intelligent and rational intercourse, but
that, indeed, instead of setting up a barrier, it removes barriers and
renders mutual comprehension far clearer and more direct than before.
This realization alters the entire perspective of life, and is the new
Glad Tidings of great joy.

It is something of all this that the Eternal City suggests to one as he
makes his pilgrimages to shrine and cloister and chapel and Basilica.
The mighty Past is eloquent with a thousand voices, and they blend into
a choral harmony of promise and prophecy for the nobler future of
humanity.

At the foot of the Scala Santa, on either side, are statues of Christ
and Judas, and of Christ and Pilate, very interesting groups by
Jacometti, and there is also a kneeling statue of Pio Nono.

The statue of Judas is considered one of the most notable of the late
modern Italian sculpture.

The Rome of to-day is in strange contrast even to the city that Page and
Hawthorne knew, in the comparatively recent past; and the Rome of the
ancients is traced only in the churches and the ruins. It is a _mot_
that one hears every language spoken in Rome, except the Italian! So
largely has the Seven-hilled City become the pleasure ground of foreign
residents. The contrast between the ordinary breakfast-table talk in
Rome and in--Boston, for instance, or Washington, is amusing. In the
Puritan capital it usually includes the topic of weather predictions and
the news in the morning paper, with whatever other of local or personal
matters of interest. In Washington, where the very actors and the events
that make the nation's history are fairly before one's eyes, the
breakfast-table conversation is apt to turn on matters that have not yet
got into the papers,--the evening session of the previous night,
perhaps, when too long prolonged under the vast dome to admit of its
having been noted in the morning press. But in Rome the brea