not say that all the flats in all the houses are occupied, but most of
them are; and if now the property of the speculators is the property of
the banks, the banks are no bad landlords, and the law does not spare
them the least of their duties to their tenants; or so, at least, it is
said.

Another typical wrong to the old Rome, or rather to the not-yet Rome,
was the building-up, beyond the Tiber, of the Quarter of the Fields, so
called, where Zola in his novel of _Rome_ has placed most of the squalor
which he so lavishly employs in its contrasts. In these he shows
himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in spite of
himself; but after I had read his book I made it my affair to visit the
scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere dei Prati. When I did so I
found that I had already passed through the quarter without noting
anything especially poor or specifically miserable, and I went a third
time to make sure that I had not overlooked something impressively
lamentable. But I did not see above three tenement-houses with the wash
hung from the windows, and with the broken shutters of poverty and
misery, in a space where on the East Side or the North Side in New York
I could have counted such houses by the score, almost the hundred. In
this quarter the streets were swept every morning as they are everywhere
in Rome, and though toward noon they were beginning to look as slovenly
as our streets look when they have just been "cleaned," I knew that the
next morning these worst avenues of Rome would be swept as our best
never have been since the days of Waring.

Beyond the tenements the generous breadth of the new streets has been
bordered by pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type,
fleetingly touched but not spoiled by the taste of the _art nouveau,_
standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one could look