little gay, it is for the readers' sake, whom I would not have perish of
their realization. Our guide spared us nothing, such was his conscience
or his science, and I wish I could remember his name, for I could
commend him as most intelligent, even, when least intelligible.
However, the traveller will know him by the winning smile of his
rosy-faced little son, who follows him round and is doubtless bringing
himself up as the guide of coming generations of tourists. There had
been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the white dust of the street
before our hotel, but the cold of the early morning, though it had not
been too much for the birds that sang in the garden back of us, had left
a skim of ice in damp spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon,
the ice was visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where
crowds of people wandered severally or collectively about in the
half-frozen mud. They were, indeed, all over the place, up and down, in
every variety of costume and aspect, but none were so picturesque as a
little group of monks who had climbed to a higher tier of the arches and
stood looking down into the depths where we looked up at them, denned
against the sky in their black robes, which opened to show their under
robes of white. They were picturesque, but they were not so monumental
as an old, unmistakable American in high-hat, with long, drooping
side-whiskers, not above a purple suspicion of dye, who sat on a broken
column and vainly endeavored to collect his family for departure.
Whenever he had gathered two or three about him they strayed off as the
others came up, and we left him sardonically patient of their adhesions
and defections, which seemed destined to continue indefinitely, while we
struggled out through the postal-card boys and mosaic-pin men to our
carriage. Then we drove away through the quarter of somewhat jerry-built
apartment-houses which neighbor the Colosseum, and on into the salmon
sunset which, after the gray of the afternoon, we found waiting us at
our hotel, with the statues on the balustrated wall of the villa garden