gnificance that most interested him. "What an
institution the confessional is! Man needs it so, that it seems as if
God must have ordained it." And he dwells upon the idea with remarkable
elaboration and persistence. Those who have followed the painful
wanderings of heart-oppressed Hilda to the carven confessional in the
great church, where she found peace, will recognize the amply unfolded
flower of this seed. What I supposed to be my notion of St. Peter's
looking like the enlargement of some liliputian edifice is also there,
though I had forgotten it till I myself reread the pages. In this book
of my memories, which is also the book of my forgettings, I must walk to
and fro freely, if I am to walk at all. None can tell the secret origin
of his thoughts.

Besides the monumental and artistic features of Rome, the human side
of it appealed to me. There was something congenial in the Romans, and,
indeed, in the Italians generally, so that I seemed to be renewing my
acquaintance with people whom I had partly forgotten. I picked up the
conversational language with unusual ease, perhaps owing to the drilling
in Latin which my father had given me; and I liked the easy, objectless
ways of the people, and the smiles which so readily took the place of
the sallow gravity which their faces wore in repose. But it was the
Transteverini women who chiefly attracted me; they wore an antique
costume familiar enough in paintings, and they claimed to be descendants
of the ancient race; they had the noble features and bearing which one
would have looked for in such descendants, at all events. Looking in
their dark, haughty eyes, one seemed to pass back through the terrible
picturesqueness of mediaeval Italy, with its Borgias and Bella Donnas,
its Lorenzos and Fornarinas, to the Rome of Nero, Augustus, Scipio, and
Tarquin. Eddy and I would sometimes make excursions across the river to
Transtevere, and stroll up and down those narrow streets, imagining
all manner of suitable adventures and histories for the inhabitants,
stalking there in their black and scarlet and yellow habiliments,
and glancing imperially from under the black brows of their dark
countenances. One afternoon during the carnival I was in a dense crowd
in the piazza, towards the lower end of the Corso, and found myself
pushed into the neighborhood of a singularly beautiful young woman of
this class, dressed in the height of her fashion, who was slowly making
her way in my dir