ling through a massive stone gateway, and
the chauffeur had taken the wheel.

As Rafael lifted his eyes to look about him once more, they looked
straight into the eyes of a man who was riding in the opposite
direction, and he smiled. He did not know that he had smiled, nor that
this man was the king of Italy. His thoughts were back again with the
conquerors of the early days, and the splendors of the ancient city.

But the king had noticed the boy, and turned to look after him. "That
was the spirit of the old Romans looking from his eyes," he said to
his attendant.

The last rays of the setting sun fell upon the scarred columns of the
ruined Forum, as the car rounded the base of the Capitoline Hill and
stopped at the spot where the Golden Milestone once marked the
beginning of the Roman roads.

Rafael was speechless; but Edith took the olive wreath from the hamper
with exclamations of delight.

"Where will you have it?" she asked the chauffeur, "on your head or
your wheel?"

"It belongs to the car triumphal," he answered as they turned and
moved cautiously through the street-car tracks of modern Rome.

"There could never have been such a record run made by your kings and
emperors of olden times," said the girl proudly to Rafael.

But he was too happy with his thoughts to make any reply, and Edith
turned her attention to the conversation between her mother and the
chauffeur.

"To the Continental Hotel," Mrs. Sprague was saying, and all too soon
they had crossed the city, and were welcomed and given rooms in the
hotel. The chauffeur bade them good-bye, and their Marathon run was a
thing of the past.

CHAPTER XIII

A RAMBLE IN ROME

"Did you see a picturesque-looking shepherd, dressed in shaggy skins,
driving his flock through the square at midnight?"

Rafael asked the question at the breakfast table one morning, about
two weeks after their arrival in Rome.

"No, indeed!" Edith answered. "I was fast asleep. How could you see
what he wore?"

"It was bright moonlight," Rafael told her in reply. "I could see
plainly his sheepskin jacket and the long hair of his goatskin
leggins. He had a great white dog to help him guide the sheep, and
they entered the square and passed through it so silently that it
seemed almost like a dream."

"Perhaps it was a dream," said Edith; but Rafael shook his head, and
the girl went on, "Now I had a dream about the geese that saved Rome;
but you will no doubt tell me