ria, and it
might be a very happy place."

[IMAGE: PENCIL SKETCHES IN ITALY, BY MRS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE]

Here was a playground for boys of imaginative but not too destructive
proclivities, such as the world hardly furnishes elsewhere. But much of
my enjoyment of it I ascribe to my friend Eddy. My conversation with
no person since then has rivalled the profundity and importance of my
communings with his sympathetic soul. We not only discussed our future
destinies and philosophical convictions, but we located in these
delicious retreats the various worlds which we purposed to explore and
inhabit during the next few hundred years. Here we passed through by
anticipation all our future experiences. Sometimes we were accompanied
by other boys; but then our visits lost their distinction; we merely
had good times in the ordinary way of boys; we were robber barons,
intrenched in our strongholds, and attacked by other robbers; or we ran
races, or held other trials of strength and activity, or we set snares
for the bright-colored fishes which lurked in some of the fountains. The
grounds were occasionally invaded by gangs of Italian boys, between whom
and ourselves existed an irreconcilable feud. We could easily thrash
them in the Anglo-Saxon manner, with nature's weapons; but they would
ambush us and assail us with stones; and once one of them struck at
me with a knife, which was prevented from entering my side only by the
stout leather belt which I chanced to wear. We denounced these assassins
to the smiling custode of the grounds, and he promised, smilingly, to
bar the entrance to them thenceforth; but he was a smiling deceiver;
our enemies came just the same. After all, we would have regretted their
absence; they added the touch of peril to our chronic romance which
made it perfect. It is forty-four years since then. Are there any other
Borghese Gardens to come for me in the future, I wonder? There was a
rough pathway along the banks of the Tiber, extending up the stream for
two or three miles, as far as the Ponte Molle, where the corktrees grew,
and farther, for aught I know. This was a favorite walk of mine, because
of the fragments of antique marbles to be found there, and also the
shells which so mysteriously abounded along the margin, as shown by the
learned conchological author hereinbefore cited. And, being of an early
rising habit, it was my wont to get up long before breakfast and tramp
up and down along the river f