sense of being in Rome. What's the use of being here unless you are here
in the spirit?

"What I mean is that I should like to feel as I did when I went to Mount
Vernon. It was one of those dreamy autumn days when the leaves were just
turning. There was the broad Potomac, and the hospitable Virginia
mansion. I had the satisfying sense that I was in the home of
Washington. Everything seemed to speak of Washington. He filled the
whole scene. It was a great experience. Why can't I feel that way about
the great events that happened down there?"

We were by this time on the height of the Janiculum near the statue of
Garibaldi. Bagster made a vague gesture toward the city that lay beneath
us. There seemed to be something in the scene that worried him. "I can't
make it seem real," he said. "I have continually to say to myself, 'That
is Rome, Italy, and not Rome, New York.' I can't make the connection
between the place and the historical personages I have read about. I
can't realize that the Epistle to the Romans was written to the people
who lived down there. Just back of that new building is the very spot
where Romulus would have lived if he had ever existed. On those very
streets Scipio Africanus walked, and Cæsar and Cicero and Paul and
Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus and Belisarius, and Hildebrand and
Michelangelo, and at one time or another about every one you ever heard
of. And how many people came to get emotions they couldn't get anywhere
else! There was Goethe. How he felt! He took it all in. And there was
Shelley writing poetry in the Baths of Caracalla. And there was Gibbon."

"But we can't all expect to be Shelleys or even Gibbons," I suggested.

"I know it," said Bagster, ruefully. "But if one has only a little