but vaguely realizes
that a lofty, unsymmetrical building rises on his right. He pauses,
perhaps, and looks in that direction as he ascends the long, low steps
of the basilica, and wonders in what part of the palace the Pope's
apartments may be, while the itinerant vender of photographs shakes
yards of poor little views out of their gaudy red bindings, very much as
Leporello unrolls the list of Don Giovanni's conquests. If the picture
peddler sees that the stranger glances at the Vatican, he forthwith
points out the corner windows of the second story and informs his victim
that 'Sua Santita' inhabits those rooms, and promptly offers photographs
of any other interior part of the Vatican but that. The tourist looks up
curiously, and finally gets rid of the fellow by buying what he does not
want, with the charitable intention of giving it to some dear but
tiresome relative at home. And ever afterward, perhaps, he associates
with his first impression of the Vatican the eager, cunning, scapegrace
features of the man who sold him the photographs.

To fix a general scheme of the buildings in the mind one must climb to
the top of the dome of the church and look down from the balcony which
surrounds the lantern. The height is so great that even the great
dimensions of the biggest palace in the world are dwarfed in the deep
perspective, and the wide gardens look small and almost insignificant.
But the relative proportions of the buildings and grounds appear
correctly, and measure each other, as it were. Moreover, it is now so
hard to obtain access to the gardens at all that the usual way of seeing
them is from the top of Saint Peter's, from an elevation of four hundred
feet.

To the average stranger 'the Vatican' suggests only the museum of
sculpture, the picture-galleries and the Loggie. He remembers, besides
the works of art which he has seen, the fact of having walked a great
distance through straight corridors, up and down short flights of marble
steps, and through irregularly shaped and unsymmetrically disposed
halls. If he had any idea of the points of the compass when he entered,
he is completely confused in five minutes, and comes out at last with
the sensation of having been walking in a labyrinth. He will find it
hard to give anyone an impression of the sort of building in which he
has been, and certainly he cannot have any knowledge of the
topographical relations of its parts. Yet in his passage through the
museums