ss
crowds of people moving here and there in a sort of maze, nothing but
this, and the sense of being very little and very helpless and of having
to be careful not to lose sight of Father Dan, for fear of being
lost--until the afternoon of the fourth day after we left home.

We were then crossing a wide rolling plain that was almost destitute of
trees, and looked, from the moving train, like green billows of the sea
with grass growing over them. Father Dan was reading his breviary for
the following day, not knowing what he would have to do in it, when the
sun set in a great blaze of red beyond the horizon, and then suddenly a
big round black ball, like a captive balloon, seemed to rise in the
midst of the glory.

I called Father Dan's attention to this, and in a moment he was
fearfully excited.

"Don't worry, my child," he cried, while tears of joy sprang to his
eyes. "Do you know what that is? That's the dome of St. Peter's! Rome,
my child, Rome!"

It was nine o'clock when we arrived at our destination, and in the midst
of a great confusion I walked by Father Dan's side and held on to his
vertical pocket, while he carried his own bag, and a basket of mine,
down the crowded platform to an open cab outside the station.

Then Father Dan wiped his forehead with his print handkerchief and I sat
close up to him, and the driver cracked his long whip and shouted at the
pedestrians while we rattled on and on over stony streets, which seemed
to be full of statues and fountains that were lit up by a great white
light that was not moonlight and yet looked like it.

But at last we stopped at a little door of a big house which seemed to
stand, with a church beside it, on a high shelf overlooking the city,
for I could see many domes like that of St. Peter lying below us.

A grill in the little door was first opened and then a lady in a black
habit, with a black band round her forehead and white bands down each
side of her face, opened the door itself, and asked us to step in, and
when we had done so, she took us down a long passage into a warm room,
where another lady, dressed in the same way, only a little grander, sat
in a big red arm-chair.

Father Dan, who was still wearing his knitted muffler, bowed very low to
this lady, calling her the Reverend Mother Magdalene, and she answered
him in English but with a funny sound which I afterwards knew to be a
foreign accent.

I remember that I thought she was very beautiful, ne