, they
ascended the mountain, and sitting down at the foot of the cross, they
quietly smoked and communed with nature unreservedly.

Crumbling old walls of Rome that lay below them; wild, uncultivated
Campagna; purple range of mountains, snow-tipped; thousand-legged,
ruined aqueducts; distant sea, but faintly revealed through the vail of
haze-bounded horizon; yellow Tiber, flowing along crumbling banks; dome
of St. Peter's, rising above the hill that shuts the Vatican from sight;
pyramid of Caius Cestius; Protestant burying-ground, with the wind
sighing through the trees a lullaby over the graves of Shelley and
Keats; distant view of Rome, slumbering artistically, and not
manufacturingly, in the sunlight of that morning--ye taught one man of
the two wild hopes for Rome of the future.

At the foot of the mountain, and adjoining the Protestant
burying-ground, there is a powder-magazine. Here a French soldier,
acting as sentry, paced his weary round. It was not long before a couple
of Roman women passed him. They saluted him; he saluted them. They
passed behind the magazine. The sentry, with the courtesy which
distinguishes Frenchmen, evidently desired to make his compliments and
pay his addresses to the _dames_. How could this be done? Before long,
two of his compatriots, evidently out for a holiday, passed him. He
beckoned to one of them, who at once took his gun and turned sentry,
while the relieved guard flew to display to the _dames_ his national
courtesy. Before Caper had time to smoke a second cigar, the soldier
returned to duty, and the one who had relieved him sprung to pay his
addresses. During the two hours that Caper and Rocjean studied the
scenery, guard was relieved four times.

'Ah!' said Rocjean, 'we are a gallant nation. Let us therefore descend
and mingle with what the high-minded John Bulls call 'the lower
orders.''

Down they went, and at the first table they came to, they found their
shoemaker, the Signore Eugenio Calzolajo, artist in leather, seated with
three Roman women. They all resembled each other like three pins. The
eldest one held a baby, the _caro bambino_, in her arms; she was
probably twenty years old. The next one was not over eighteen; while
the youngest had evidently not passed her sixteenth year.

The artist in leather saluted Caper and Rocjean with the title of
_Illustrissimi_, (they both paid their bills punctually,) and, as he saw
that the other tables were full, he at once mad