Noble
Guards of the corps of fifty gentlemen known under that name ride beside
the carriage doors. The closed carriage is a simple brougham, having the
Pope's coat of arms painted on the door, but in summer he occasionally
goes out in an open landau. He drives several times round the avenues,
and when he descends, the officer of the Guards dismounts and opens the
carriage door. He generally walks in the neighbourhood of the Chinese
pavilion and along the Torrione, where the papal observatory is built.

Leo the Thirteenth is fond of variety--and no wonder, shut up for life
as he is in the Vatican; he enjoys directing work and improvements in
the gardens; he likes to talk with Vespignani, the architect of the Holy
Apostolic Palaces, who is also the head of the Catholic party in the
Roman municipality, to go over the plans of work he has ordered, to give
his opinion, and especially to see that the work itself is executed in
the shortest possible time. Time is short for a pope; Sixtus the Fifth,
who filled Rome and Italy with himself, reigned only five years;
Rodrigo Borgia eleven years; Leo the Tenth, but nine.

[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF ACQUA FELICE]

In 1893 the Pope began to inhabit the new pavilion designed and built by
Vespignani in pure fifteenth-century style. It is built against the
Torrione, the ancient round tower constructed by Saint Leo the Fourth
about the year 850. In 1894 Leo the Thirteenth made a further extension,
and joined another building to the existing one by means of a loggia, on
the spot once occupied by the old barracks of the papal gendarmes, who
are still lodged in the gardens, and whose duty it is to patrol the
precincts by day and night. Indeed, the fact that two dynamiters were
caught in the garden in 1894 proves that a private police is necessary.

During the great heat of summer the Pope, after saying mass, goes into
the garden about nine in the morning and spends the whole day there,
receiving everyone in the garden pavilion he has built for himself, just
as he would receive in the Vatican. He dines there, too, and rests
afterward, guarded by the gendarmes on duty, to whom he generally sends
a measure of good wine--another survival of a country custom; and in the
cool of the day he again gets into his carriage, and often does not
return to the Vatican till after sunset, toward the hour of Ave Maria.

In the evening, about an hour later,--at 'one of the night,' according
to the old Rom