ed about with little shining nickel-plated
trays held high above their heads, spurs and swords clanked and
clattered, by the middle of the evening not a table was vacant.

It was simply the usual big Continental _cafe_, but to me as new and
strange as everything else in the wonderful life in the wonderful world
into which I had strayed from the old familiar ways of Philadelphia,
with a long halt between only in England where the _cafe_ does not
exist. To the marble-topped tables, the gilding, mirrors and plush,
novelty lent a charm they have never had since and probably would soon
have lost had we been left to contemplate them in solitary state, as it
seemed probable we should. For we knew nobody in Rome except Sandro, the
youthful enthusiastic Roman cyclist we had picked up in Montepulciano,
cycled with through the Val di Chiana on a sunny October Sunday, and run
across again in Rome where he amiably showed us the hospitality of the
capital by occasionally drinking coffee with us at our expense, and by
once introducing a friend, a tall, slim, good-looking young man of such
elegance of manner and such a princely air of condescension, that Sandro
himself was impressed and joined us again, later on the same evening, to
explain our privilege in having entertained the Queen's hair-dresser
unawares. Foreigners did not often find their way into the _Nazionale_.
They were almost as few in number as women, who were very few, for as
women in Rome never dined,--or so I gathered from my observations at the
_Posta_, the _Falcone_ and the _Cavour_,--they never drank coffee. Only
on Sundays would they descend upon the _cafe_ with their husbands and
children, and then it was to devour ices and cakes at a rate that
convinced me they devoured little else from one Sunday to the next. When
I asked for the _Times_--they took the _Times_ at the _Nazionale_--the
waiter almost invariably answered: "It reads itself, the _Signore
Tedesco_ has it," and the _Signore Tedesco_, a mild German student who
for his daily lesson in English read the advertisement columns from
beginning to end, was the only foreigner who appeared regularly at any
table save our own.

And yet at ours, before I could say how it came about, a little group
collected, and every evening in the furthest room J. and I began to hold
an informal reception which gave us all the advantages of social life
and none of its responsibilities. We could preside in the travel-worn
tweeds of