into the interior of their dwellings showed the
uncarpeted brick floors, as dismal as the pavement of a tomb.

They drew their old cloaks about them, nevertheless, and threw the
corners over their shoulders, with the dignity of attitude and action
that have come down to these modern citizens, as their sole inheritance
from the togated nation. Somehow or other, they managed to keep up their
poor, frost-bitten hearts against the pitiless atmosphere with a quiet
and uncomplaining endurance that really seems the most respectable point
in the present Roman character. For in New England, or in Russia, or
scarcely in a hut of the Esquimaux, there is no such discomfort to be
borne as by Romans in wintry weather, when the orange-trees bear icy
fruit in the gardens; and when the rims of all the fountains are shaggy
with icicles, and the Fountain of Trevi skimmed almost across with a
glassy surface; and when there is a slide in the piazza of St. Peter's,
and a fringe of brown, frozen foam along the eastern shore of the Tiber,
and sometimes a fall of great snowflakes into the dreary lanes and
alleys of the miserable city. Cold blasts, that bring death with them,
now blow upon the shivering invalids, who came hither in the hope of
breathing balmy airs.

Wherever we pass our summers, may all our inclement months, from
November to April, henceforth be spent in some country that recognizes
winter as an integral portion of its year!

Now, too, there was especial discomfort in the stately picture
galleries, where nobody, indeed,--not the princely or priestly founders,
nor any who have inherited their cheerless magnificence,--ever dreamed
of such an impossibility as fireside warmth, since those great palaces
were built. Hilda, therefore, finding her fingers so much benumbed that
the spiritual influence could not be transmitted to them, was persuaded
to leave her easel before a picture, on one of these wintry days, and
pay a visit to Kenyon's studio. But neither was the studio anything
better than a dismal den, with its marble shapes shivering around the
walls, cold as the snow images which the sculptor used to model in his
boyhood, and sadly behold them weep themselves away at the first thaw.

Kenyon's Roman artisans, all this while, had been at work on the
Cleopatra. The fierce Egyptian queen had now struggled almost out of the
imprisoning stone; or, rather, the workmen had found her within the mass
of marble, imprisoned there by magi