from one rude step to another, over stones that
are mossy, slimy, and green with sedge, because in a century of their
wild play, Nature has adopted the Fountain of Trevi, with all its
elaborate devices, for her own. Finally the water, tumbling, sparkling,
and dashing, with joyous haste and never-ceasing murmur, pours itself
into a great marble-brimmed reservoir, and fills it with a quivering
tide, on which is seen continually a snowy semicircle of momentary foam
from the principal cascade, as well as a multitude of snow points from
smaller jets. The basin occupies the whole breadth of the piazza, whence
flights of steps ascend to its border. A boat might float and make
voyages from one shore to another, in this mimic lake."

The great aqueducts, by which these fountains are supplied, are marvels
of ingenuity and engineering skill, sometimes bringing the pure crystal
stream from lakes and hills thirty and forty miles away. Dyer, the old
eighteenth-century poet, has a graceful mention of them in his "Ruins of
Rome":

"From yon blue hills
Dim in the clouds, the radiant aqueducts
Turn their innumerable arches o'er
The spacious desert, brightening in the sun,
Proud and more proud in their august approach;
High o'er irriguous vales and woods and towns,
Glide the soft whispering waters in the wind,
And more united pour their silver streams
Among the figur'd rocks in murmuring falls,
Musical ever."

These noble aqueducts were the chief source of Rome's health and luxury,
and were in charge of Curators or Prefects, who formed a kind of "water
board." It is a system which might with great advantage be adopted by
our own large cities, which are lamentably wanting in a good and liberal
supply of fresh water--greedy monopolists charging what they choose, and
giving us the precious fluid clean or unclean, when or how they like.
The Government might do much to improve this state of things by
constructing aqueducts after the ancient Roman style.

Another marked feature in Roman life we are _not_ so anxious to see
imitated in our own country, is the abnormal quantity of beggars one
meets everywhere. They are of every sort and description, and swarm
round you wherever you go. Some of them a most pitiful and distressing
sight, only half clothed and seemingly starving. Their number is only
equalled by the legion of priests, who come upon you at every turn, in
all grades, f