[Illustration: NEAR THE SOURCE OF THE TIBER.]

"Ecce Tiberum!" cried the Roman legions when they first beheld the
Scottish Tay. What power of association could have made them see in
the clear and shallow stream the likeless of their tawny Tiber,
with his full-flowing waters sweeping down to the sea? Perhaps those
soldiers under whose mailed and rugged breasts lay so tender a thought
of home came from the northerly region among the Apennines, where a
little bubbling mountain-brook is the first form in which the storied
Tiber greets the light of day. One who has made a pilgrimage from its
mouth to its source thus describes the spot: "An old man undertook to
be our guide. By the side of the little stream, which here constitutes
the first vein of the Tiber, we penetrated the wood. It was an immense
beech-forest.... The trees were almost all great gnarled veterans
who had borne the snows of many winters: now they stood basking above
their blackened shadows in the blazing sunshine. The little stream
tumbled from ledge to ledge of splintered rock, sometimes creeping
into a hazel thicket, green with long ferns and soft moss, and then
leaping once more merrily into the sunlight. Presently it split into
numerous little rills. We followed the longest of these. It led us
to a carpet of smooth green turf amidst an opening in the trees;
and there, bubbling out of the green sod, embroidered with white
strawberry-blossoms, the delicate blue of the crane's bill and dwarf
willow-herb, a copious little stream arose. Here the old man paused,
and resting upon his staff, raised his age-dimmed eyes, and pointing
to the gushing water, said, _'E questo si chiama il Tevere a Roma!'_
('And this is called the Tiber at Rome!') ... We followed the stream
from the spot where it issued out of the beech-forest, over barren
spurs of the mountains crested with fringes of dark pine, down to a