ir magnificent
view, which may be pretty confidently relied upon to command the dome of
St. Peter's. That magnificent stone bubble seems to blow all round the
horizon.

When you have taken your furnished flat, the same agency will provide
you a cook at ten or twelve dollars a month, a maid at seven dollars, a
lady's maid at eight or nine dollars, and so on; the cook will prefer to
sleep out of the house. Then will come the question of provisions, and
these seem really to be dear in Rome. Meats and vegetables both are
dear, and game and poultry. Beef will be forty cents a pound, and veal
and mutton in proportion; a chicken which has been banting for the table
from its birth will be forty cents; eggs which have not yet taken active
shape are twenty-five and thirty cents throughout winters so bland that
a hen of any heart can hardly keep from laying every day. I am afraid I
am no authority on butter and milk, and groceries I do not know the
prices of; but coffee ought to be cheap, for nobody drinks anything but
substitutes more or less unabashed.

For the passing stranger, or even the protracted so-journer, whose time
and money are not too much at odds, a hotel is best, and a hotel in the
new quarter is pleasanter than one in the old quarters. Ours, at any
rate, was in a wide, sunny, and (if I must own it) dusty street, laid
out in a line of beauty on the borders of the former Villa Ludovisi,
where the aging or middle-aging reader used to come to see Guercino's
"Aurora" in the roof of the casino. Now all trace of the garden is
hidden under vast and vaster hotels and great blond apartment-houses,
and ironed down with trolley-rails; but the Guercino has been spared,
though it is no longer so accessible to the public. Still, there is a
garden left, and our hotel, with others, looks across the sun and dust
of its street into the useful vegetation of the famous old Capuchin
convent, with the church, to which I came so eagerly so long ago to
revere Guido's "St. Michael and the Dragon" and the decorative bones of
the good brothers braided on the walls and roofs of the crypt in the
indissoluble community of floral and geometric designs.

[Illustration: 14 THE CAPUCHIN CHURCH, ROME]

All through the months of February and March I woke to the bell that
woke the brothers to their prayers before daybreak and burst the
beauty-sleep of the hotel-dwellers, who have so far outnumbered the
monks since the obliteration of the once neigh