CHAPTER II.

A FAUN lives in this Ponte Sisto water. Often in those days I heard him laughing, and under the splashing of the spouts caught the tinkle of his pipe.

In every one of the fountains of my Rome a naiad, or a satyr, a god, or a genius, has taken refuge, and in its depths dreams of the ruined temples and the leveled woods, and hides in its cool, green, moss-growing nest all day long, and, when the night falls, wakes and calls aloud.

Water is the living joy of Rome.

When the sky is yellow as brass, and the air sickly with the fever-mists, and the faces of men are all livid and seared, and all the beasts lie faint with the drought, it is the song of the water that keeps our life in us, sounding all through the | | 14 daylight and the darkness across the desert of brick and stone. Men here in Rome have "written their names in water," and it has kept them longer than bronze or marble. When one is far away across the mountains, and can no more see the golden wings of the archangel against the setting sun, it is not of statues or palaces, not of Cæsars or senators, not even of the statues, that you think with wistful longing remembrance and desire: it is of the water that is everywhere in Rome, floating, falling, shining, splashing, with the clouds mirrored on its surface, and the swallows skimming its foam.

I wonder to hear them say that Rome is sad, with all that mirth and music of its water laughing through all its streets, till the steepest and stoniest ways are murmurous with it as any brook-fed forest-depths. Here water is protean; sovereign and slave, sorcerer and servant; slaking the mule's thirst, and shining in porphyry on the prince's terrace; filling the well in the cabbage-garden, and leaping aloft against the Pope's palace; first called to fill the baths of the Agrippines and serve the Naumachia of Augustus, it bubbles from a griffin's jaws or a wolf's teeth, or any other of the thousand quaint things set in the masonry at the street-corners, and washes the people's herbs and carrots, and is lapped by the tongues of dogs, and thrashed by the bare brown arms of washing-women; first brought from the hills to flood the green Numidian marble of the thermæ and lave the limbs of the patricians between the cool mosaic walls of the tepidarium, it contentedly becomes a household thing, twinkling like a star at the bottom of deep old wells in dusky courts, its rest broken a dozen times a day by the clash of the chain on the copper pail, above it the carnations of the kitchen balcony and the caged blackbird of the cook.

One grows to love the Roman fountains as sea-born men the sea. Go where you will there is the water: whether it foams by Trevi where the green moss grows in it like ocean weed about the feet of the ocean god, or whether it rushes, reddened by the evening light, from the mouth of an old lion that once saw Cleopatra; whether it leaps high in air trying to reach the gold cross on St. Peter's, or pours its triple cascade over the Pauline granite, or spouts out of a great barrel in a wall in old Trastevere, or throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as Arachne's web in a green garden-way where the lizards run, | | 15 or in a crowded corner where the fruit-sellers sit against the wall;--in all its shapes one grows to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging melody all through the year.

And best of them all I love my own fountain that tumbles out of the masonry here close to the bridge of Sextus, and has its two streams crossing one another like sabres gleaming bright against the dark, damp, moss-grown stones. There are so many fountains in our Rome, glorious, beautiful, and springing to high heaven, that nobody notices this one much, as coming down through the Via Giulia the throngs hurry on over the bridge, few I fear praying for the soul of the man that built it,--as the inscription asks of you to do, with a humility that is touching in a pontiff.

I would not go over the bridge with Maryx that morning, but sat down underneath my fountain, that was so fresh and welcome in the warm June noon, where twenty years before I had raised my stall and dedicated it to Apollo Sandaliarius and the good Saints Crispin and Crispian, in that jumbling of the pagan and the ecclesiastic which is of all Roman things most Roman.

My Faun was singing, sheltered safe under the mossy wall. The Fauns are nowhere dead. They only hide in the water or the leaves, laughing and weeping like children: then you say, "the fountains play;" or you say, "the leaves quiver."

Birds may not sing at noon. They are afraid to wake great Pan, who sleeps all mid-day, as they know, and will have silence. The Fauns in the water do not heed Pan's pleasure or displeasure; he is driven out of all cities, and they know the grand god has small pleasure in a world that fells all his sacred woods. The birds are more faithful, being led by the woodpecker, who once was the friend of Mars, and then father of Faunus, and made all the kings of the earth meet together in his palace that Virgil has painted for us.

But all this is nonsense, you say. Very well: if it be nonsense to you, be sure to you Rome is dead, and you walk over its stones blindfold and deaf.

"It is an Ariadne," said I to the Faun in the water, for to keep one's opinion is a sweet pleasure and a cheap one; as Winckelmann would have it that the Capitoline Ariadne was a Leucothea, so I was resolute that the Borghese Bacchus was an Ariadne. Of course I know little of art; I only love it | | 16 greatly,--just as the men who most love women are those who know their moods and minds the least.

"It is an Ariadne," I said to my dog Palès, left on guard on a little straw under my stool,--a white, fox-faced, female thing, with a shrewish temper, and many original views of her own.

There was not a soul about, and not a body astir. The broad sunshine lay on the Tiber, making it look all of a hot brazen yellow: many martyrs used to be thrown into it just here, so Eusebius says, and it is not very far off that the boatman lived, in the Borgian time, who, being asked why he had not given alarm when he saw a corpse thrown in, replied that he saw so many every night that he naturally thought nothing of it.

There was no one moving, and no shadows on the hot, white stones; over the bridge and down the Via Giulia all was still and empty, and all the shutters of the houses were closed. Only at the house at the corner where I lived, my friend Pippo, the cook, stepped out one moment into the balcony over the bridge, and, with one of his pet pigeons perched on his forehead, hallooed out that he had a stew ready, full of onions and peppercorns.

But a stew on a noonday in mid-summer was an abomination to the senses and the reason; and I took no notice of him; and he went in out of the sun, pigeon and all, and the place was quite quiet, except for the splashing and the foaming of the water in the wall, which sounded so cool and babbled so of forest-leaves and brook-fed rushes that no one could be hot within earshot of it. I scarcely envied Maryx in his marble court upon the hill, above Tasso's cypresses and under Galba's oaks.

There was a cabbage-leaf nice and wet upon my head, and above that a square of untanned leather, stretched upon four sticks, and wet, too, with sprinkled water, and on the board before me, among the tools and the old leather, were a handful of vine-leaves, and the half of a watermelon, and a flask of wine: who could be hot with all that?

There was nothing that needed haste,--only the butcher's big old boots that he had brought over that morning from his shop by St. Crispian's church; and I let them lie with the pair of little smart scarlet shoes that I had tacked up for | | 17 handsome Dea at the seed-shop yonder, who dearly loved a students' ball and had a father as sharp of eye and hard of heart as Shylock. I took a little wine, and stretched myself, as Palès was doing at her ease; and the Faun in the fountain was singing and piping his loudest of the days when men were wise and worshiped Sylvanus upon Aventine, and in the green gardens and the meadows and the forests invoked him as Sanctus Salutaris.

And with the music of their song and the bubbling of the water into the great stone basin in the wall, my unfinished sleep came over me again, and I dreamt that I was in the gallery of the Cæsars again, and that again I heard the gods, and the poets, and the wanton, dispute around Ariadne.

Ariadne stretched her hand and touched mine.

I awoke. Palès was barking; the drowsy sunshine was white about me, and between it and me a figure stood.

Was it Ariadne's?

I stumbled to my feet.

"My dear, do not take the poppy," I muttered, stupidly. "Love was cruel: that he always is."

Then I got fuller awakened, and was only more bewildered. I could not stir; the sun blinded me, and the noise of Palès and of the fountain deafened me; I could only blink my eyes and stare as an old gray owl may do, startled out of sleep in the daytime, and seeing something fair and strange light on the branches of his hollow, ivy-mantled tree. The figure between me and the Via Giulia was so like the Ariadne of Borghese that I could only gaze at it idiotically and wish that I were in-doors with Pippo and his peppercorns. For there are old weird legends here and there in Rome of-statues that have come to life and given little peace to those that roused them.

The figure between me and the golden light and the dark walls had poppies in her hand, and a purple passion-flower; the stuffs she wore looked to me like the variegated alabaster; she had the small head, the clustered hair, the youthful eyes, the look as of one whom Aidoneus had sent up to seek for light and life and whom Love claimed.

"Do not take the poppies: they mean death!" I stammered, blinking like an owl; and then I saw that it was not the bronze of the Borghese made alive, but a mere naturally living crea- | | 18 ture, a girl, travel-stained and tired, and holding gathered flowers that were drooping in the heat.

She came a little nearer, and leaned her two hands upon my board, and Palès ceased to yell, and smelt at her almost tenderly.

"The poppies are no harm," she said, with a little wonder. "Will you tell me where the Ghetto is? I want the Portico of Octavia."

When I heard her voice speaking, then I knew that it was not my Ariadne, with her robes of gold and rose, and her crown of imperishable ivy, but only a mere human thing standing between me and the sunshine.

Her skirts were white, indeed, but of the roughest linen spun on village distaffs, and what I had taken for the hues of the alabaster was an old Roman scarf of many colors such as our Trasteverine women wear. Her small and slender feet were disfigured in coarse shoes covered over with gray powder from the highways and the streets. The poppies were common field-flowers such as grow everywhere by millions when the corn is high, and the passion-flower, no doubt, she had pulled down from any one of the garden-walls or the campagna hedges. But in her face,--though the skin was golden with sun-tan, and the eyes were heavy with fatigue, and the clustering hair was tumbled and dull from heat and dust,--in the face I saw my Ariadne.

I had not been wholly dreaming this time.

"I have come from the sea," she said, with her hands leaning on the plank of my board. "I have lost my way. I do not know where to go. You look good: would you tell me where the Portico of Octavia is? That is what I want."

She was a beautiful girl, a child almost. I stumbled to my feet on a sort of instinct of deference to her sex and youth. Though she was very poor, as one could see, there was a strange grace about her as she stood with all the hot sun beating down on her bronze-hued head, that should have had the crown of ivy on it. She looked tired, but not timid in any way; and there was a look of eager and joyous expectation on her face. Just so might Claudia Quinta have looked when with her own unaided hands she drew the stranded vessel of the Magna Mater off the banks of Tiber, in triumph and vindication of her innocence.

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"The Portico of Octavia?" I echoed, stupidly. "Do you know what it is, now, my dear?"

"Yes; I have read of it in old Latin books."

(In Latin books--good heavens!)

"And you want to go to the Ghetto?"

"Yes; that is the name."

"Do you know what that is?"

"No."

"Why do you go, then?"

"There lives an old man there that was my mother's father: I was to go to him."

An old man in the Ghetto and she my Ariadne!--the two went ill together. Not that I have any prejudices. Though a Roman born, I have lived in too many lands, and, in my own way, with too many dead men's minds in books, to have any hostility against class or country. Only for this girl whom all the gods had counseled, and who had Love's poppy-flowers in her hands, to go to that foul quarter that had once the gilded vileness of the Suburra and has now the dingy vileness of the Ghetto! She saw the astonishment and reluctance in me, and the foolish impulse of displeasure that I felt must have shown itself on my features, for she looked disappointed.

"I can ask some one else," she said, a little sadly. "You have your stall to leave, and perhaps it is far away. I beg your pardon."

But I did not like to let her go. It seemed churlish, and I might never see her again. Rome is large, and the Ghetto foul air for body and spirit.

"No, no," I cried to her, for she was already turning away. "It is not that. It is not far off, and, if it were, the stall is safe with the dog; but in the heat, and to that pig-sty,--not but what I will go with you, my dear; oh, yes; only wait a little till the noon sun passes."

"I would rather not wait," she said, and paused, but looked at me doubtingly, as though my hesitation had suggested to her some misgiving of herself or me, and that I did not like.

I wondered what the Faun on the fountain thought of it; he and I often gossiped together; but I had no time to take counsel of him, for she was moving away towards the bridge and the nightingale-haunted slope of Janus's hill.

"That is the wrong road," I cried to her. "You have no | | 20 need to cross the river. My dear, if I seemed to hesitate I must have seemed a brute. I had been asleep in this hot air, and got as empty-pated as a scooped-out melon that the boys have emptied in the sun. Just wait here till this great noon glare passes,--it is shady here, and not a soul will come; then I will go with you; for the streets are puzzling when one does not know them; not that there ever was a time that they were strange to me, the gods be praised."

She looked at me quickly with confidence. "You love Rome?"

"Who loves not his mother? And our mother is the mother of the world."

She looked glad and as if pleased with me, and took the stool I pushed to her, where the shadow of the leather could shelter her from the sun.

Palès licked her hand,--Palès, who hated strangers, especially those whose hands were empty.

She gave a short sigh, as of fatigue, once seated; but her eyes went to the water springing from the wall, and to the domes and temples that she could see afar off. As I happened to have a little rush basket full of the first figs under my vine-leaves (I had meant them for handsome Dea, but Dea would have the scarlet shoes), I gave them to this girl, and she thanked me with a smile, and slaked her thirst with one of them, which comforted me, for it seemed to make her more thoroughly human. I was still a little afraid of her, as one is of the creatures of one's dreams.

"You spoke of the sea; you come from the Maremma," I asked her; for no one who sits all his life long at a street-corner can bear to sit in silence, as she was willing to do.

"Yes; from the coast."

"But you seem to remember Rome?"

"My father was a Roman."

She spoke with a flash of pride.

"Is he dead, my dear?"

"He died a year ago," she answered; and her beautiful curved mouth grew pale and trembled. "He told me when the money would not last any more, I must try and find the old man by the Portico of Octavia; and the money was done: so I came."

"What was your father?"

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"A sculptor; and he carved wood, too."

"And this old man?"

"I do not know. I believe he was cruel to my mother. But I am not sure. I never heard very much. Only, when he was dying he gave me some papers and told me to come to Rome. And I would have come to Rome if he had not told me, because there was no place on earth he loved so well, and only to see it and die, he said that was enough"--

"He lived very near, to die without seeing it."

"He was very poor always, and in ill health," she said, under her breath. The words rebuked my thoughtless and cynical remark.

"And this old man who is in the Ghetto, is he all you have to look to?"

"Yes. I think he will be glad to see me: do not you?"

"Surely, if he have eyes," I said, and felt a little choking in my throat, there was something so solitary and astray in her, yet nothing afraid.

"And what is your name, my dear?"

"They called me Giojà."

"Giojà. And why that?"

"I suppose because my mother thought me a joy to her when I came. I do not know. It was her fancy"--

"A pretty one, but still heathenish as a name,--as a baptismal name, you know: it is not in the Saints' Calendar."

"No. I have no saint. I do not know much about the saints. I have read St. Jerome's writings, and the City of God, and Chrysostom; but I do not care for them; they were hard men and cruel, and they derided the beautiful gods, and broke their statues. It was Julian that was right, not they: only he killed so many beautiful birds. I would not have done that."

I was of her way of thinking myself; but in Rome, with the monks and the priests everywhere at that time, as many as ants that swarm in midsummer dust across a roadway, one had to be guarded how one said such things, or one got no ecclesiastical sandals or sacerdotal shoon to stitch, and fell into bad odor.

"No, there is no saint for me," she said, a little sadly again, and looked up at the blue sky, as though conscious that other girls had celestial guardians yonder in the golden shrines and upward in the azure heavens, but she was all alone.

"It does not matter," I said, heathenishly, like the pagan | | 22 that I was, as Father Trillo, who was a heavy man, and trod heavily, and wore out many a pair of shoes, would often tell me with a twinkle in his merry eyes.

"It is no matter. Let us hope the gods of joy are with you that the Christians killed. May-be they will serve as good a purpose as the saints. They are not really dead. You may see them everywhere here in Rome, if you have faith. Only wait till the night falls."

She sat silently, not eating her figs, but watching the water gush out from the wall. She had dipped her poppies in it to refresh them; the passiflora was already dead. There was a perplexed expectant look in her dreamy eyes, as though indeed Persephone had really sent her up to earth.

"Have you come all the way from the sea to-day? and from what part of the coast?" I asked her, to keep her there in the shade a little.

"From below Orbetello," she answered. "I have walked a part of the way; the other part boats brought me that were coasting. The fisher-people are always kind; and many know me."

"Were you not sorry to leave the sea?"

"I should have been, only I came to Rome. Where we lived it was lovely; great rocks, and those rocks all thyme-covered, and the sheep and the goats grazing; farther in the marshes it is terrible, you know,--all reeds, and rushes, and swamps, and salt-water pools, and birds that cry strangely, and the black buffalo. But even there, there are all the dead cities, and the Etruscan kings' tombs. I did not lose sight of the sea till the day before yesterday, when they told me I must turn inland, and indeed I knew it by the maps; but I could not find the birds and the thickets that Virgil writes of, nor the woods along the river: it is all sand now. There was a barge coming up the river with pines that had been felled, and I paid the men in it a little, and they let me come up the Tiber with them, for I was tired. We were all the two nights and yesterday on the water. I was not dull. I was looking always for Rome. But the river is dreary; it is not at all like what Virgil says."

"Virgil wrote two thousand years ago. Did that never occur to you?"

"I thought it would be all the same," she said, with a little | | 23 sigh. "Why should it change? They have not bettered it. The forests and the roses must have been lovelier than the sand. Last night it rained, and there was thunder. I got very wet, and I grew a little afraid. The pines looked so helpless, great strong things that had used to stand so straight by the side of the waves, thrown down there and bound, and going to be built into walls for scaffolding and burnt up in ovens and furnaces, and never going to see the sea and the sea-gulls and the coral-fishing any more! But nothing really hurt me, you see, and when the rain passed off it was sunrise, and, though we were leagues away, I saw a gold cross shining where the clouds had broken, and one of the bargemen said to me, 'There! that is St. Peter's,' and I thought my heart would have broken with happiness; and when at last we landed at the wharf where the lions' heads are, I sprang on to the landing-place, and I knelt down and kissed the earth, and thanked God because at last I saw Rome."

I listened, and felt my eyes wet, and my heart warmed to her, because Rome is to me--as to all who love her truly--as mother and as brethren, and as the world and the temple of the world.

"I thank thee who hast led me out of darkness into light," I murmured as the Hebrew singer does. "That is what Maryx said when first his foot touched Rome. It is a pity Maryx should be gone across the bridge to his nightingales."

"Who is Maryx?"

"A great man."

"And you?"

"A small one,--as you see."

"And why have you Apollo there?

She was looking at a little statue, a foot high, above my stall, that Maryx had made for me many years before, when he was a youth studying at the Villa Medicis.

"That is Apollo Sandaliarius. The shoemakers had their share of the sun-god in Rome; to be sure it was not till Rome became corrupt, which takes from the glory of it; but in his statues he is always sandaled, you know. And underneath there are Crispin and Crispianus, who have their church hard by; the brother saints who made shoes for the poor for nothing, and the angels brought them the leather: that picture of them is on stained glass; look at their palm-leaves and their awls: they are always represented like that."

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"You are a Roman?"

"Oh, yes. You may have heard of that cobbler whom Pliny tells us of, who had his stall in the midst of the Forum, and who had a crow that talked to the Romans from the rostrum and was beloved by them, and which crow he slew in a fit of rage because it tore up a new bit of leather, as if the poor bird could help destroying something, having consorted with lawgivers and statesmen! That man they slew, and the crow they buried with divine honors in the Appian Way. I am the ghost of that most unlucky man. I have always told the people so; and they will believe anything, if only you tell it them often enough and loudly enough. Have they not believed in the virtues of kings, and are they not just beginning to believe in the virtues of republics? The sun is off one side of Via Giulia; now do you wish to be going? Will you not break a piece of bread with your figs first?"

She would not, and we took the way along the river towards the Ghetto.

As we walked, she told me a little more about herself, and it was easy to surmise the rest. Her father, when little more than a student, had been ordered out of the city in exile for some real or imagined insult to the Church, and, ruined in his art and fortunes, had gone, a broken-hearted man at five-and-twenty, to a dull village on the Ligurian Sea, taking with him the daughter of a Syrian Jew, Ben Sulim, whom he had wedded there, she changing her faith for his. What manner of man he might have been was not very clear, because she loved him, and where women love they lie so innocently and unwittingly of the object which they praise; but I gathered that be had had, probably, talent, and a classic fancy rather than genius, and had been weak and quickly beaten, finding it simpler to lie in the sun and sorrow for his fate than to rise and fight against it: there are many such.

She said he had used to carve busts and friezes and panels in the hard arbutus wood, and sometimes in the marble that lies strewn about that coast, and would model also in terra-cotta and clay, and send his things by hucksters to the towns for sale, and so get a little money for the simple life they led.

Life costs but little on these sunny, silent shores: four walls of loose stones, a roof of furze and brambles, a fare of fish and fruit and millet-bread, a fire of drift-wood easily gathered,-- | | 25 and all is told. For a feast, pluck the violet cactus; for a holiday, push the old red boat to sea, and set the brown sail square against the sun: nothing can be cheaper, perhaps few things can be better.

To feel the western breezes blow over that sapphire sea, laden with the fragrance of a score of blossoming isles. To lie under the hollow rocks, where centuries before the fisher-folk put up that painted tablet to the Stella Virginis, for all poor ship-wrecked souls. To climb the high hills through the tangle of myrtle and tamarisk, and the tufted rosemary, with the kids bleating above upon some unseen height. To watch the soft night close in, and the warning lights shine out over shoals and sunken rocks, and the moon hang low and golden in the blue dusk at the end there under the arch of the boughs. To spend long hours in the cool, fresh break of day drifting with the tide, and leaping with bare free limbs into the waves and lying outstretched upon them, glancing down to the depths below, where silvery fish are gliding, and coral branches are growing, and pink shells are floating like rose-leaves, five fathoms low and more. Oh, a good life, and none better, abroad in the winds and weather, as Nature meant that every living thing should be, only, alas! the devil put it into the mind of man to build cities! A good life for the soul and the body; and from it this sea-born Joy came to seek the Ghetto!

We went through the crooked streets whilst the shadow of the houses was still scarce wider than a knife's edge, through the. dusty and sorrowful ways once threaded by the silken litters, with their closed curtains and fringes of gold and their amorous secrets and their running slaves, of the beautiful women who once gave fashion and fame to the quarter of the Velabrum. She looked as if such a litter should be bearing her to feast the sight of Cæsar and lean on cushions in that casement "whence the women could see the play of the fountains as they supped."

But that window is now only a line of shattered brick upon the Palatine, and this my Ariadne was going to the Ghetto!

What a face she had! I thought if one could only have plaited an ivy wreath and set it on her curls, instead of the hood she had pulled over them, the Borghese bronze would have been her very likeness. She seemed to me Ariadne caressed by the sea and made sweet and strong by it, and with fair | | 26 young limbs, and young breasts like sea-shells; but no lover, mortal or immortal, had touched her yet.

She went through the streets with happy dreaming eyes, as of one who goes to a beloved friend long unseen.

"You knew Rome before?" I asked her.

"I never saw it with my eyes, nor walked in it," she answered me. "But I know it well. My father had Pliny and Pausanias and Strabo and all the old books, and pictures, drawings, and models he had made, and would bring them out and talk of them half the day and night. When I was quite little I set off to walk to Rome. I was three years old, I think; and they found me asleep among the myrtles on the hills three miles from home. My father would sit on the shore and look over the hills eastward so often, with such a hunger in his eyes. 'The moon is looking on her now,' he would say: 'if only I could see the bronze Augustus black against the sky before I die!' But he never did. It must be so with any Roman. It would be so with you."

"It was so with me. Only I--returned."

"Ah, he had not the strength! But he loved Rome always. Better than my mother, or than me."

Then her mouth shut close, and she looked vexed to have seemed to pass any reproach on him.

We went under the arch of Janus and past the bright spring of the Argentine water.

"That is the spring of the Dioscuri, I think?" she said, and looked at me eagerly.

Who could have had the heart to tell her it was an oft-disputed point?

"Yes; they say so," I said to her. "You see, my dear, we must be different men in Rome from any other men; the very cattle-drivers can water their bullocks from where the divine Tyndarides let their chargers drink."

"You believe in the Dioscuri?" she said, with serious eyes on mine, and I saw that unless I should say I did I should never win a step farther in her confidence.

"Of course," I answered; "who would lose them, the brethren of light by the lakeside?"

And indeed I do believe all things and all traditions. History is like that old stag that Charles of France found out hunting in the woods once, with the bronze collar round its | | 27 neck on which was written, "Cæsar mihi hoc donavit." How one's fancy loves to linger about that old stag, and what a crowd of mighty shades come thronging at the very thought of him! How wonderful it is to think of,--that quiet gray beast leading his lovely life under the shadows of the woods, with his hinds and their fawns about him, whilst Cæsar after Cæsar fell and generation on generation passed away and perished! But the sciolist taps you on the arm. "Deer average fifty years of life: it was some mere court trick, of course: how easy to have such a collar made!" Well, what have we gained? The stag was better than the sciolist.

She smiled, and lingered there, with the look always on her face as of one who sees his native land at length after long absence.

For the saints she cared little more than they did for her. I saw she seldom looked at the frescoed virgins, and the china martyrs behind their iron gratings at the turnings of the streets; but wherever an old fluted column was built into the dingy brick, or where a broad semi-circle sprang across a passage-way with green weeds in its crumbled carvings, there her gaze rested, and a certain shadow of disappointment and of wonder began to replace the eager expectation on her face.

"I have seen Rome in my dreams every night," she said, at last. "Only I thought that it was all of marble,--marble, and gold, and ivory, and the laurels and the palms growing everywhere, and the courts in the temples open to the sky; and it is all dust,--all dust and dirt."

"It is not dust in Rome, nor dirt," said I. "It is dead men's ashes. You forget, my dear, Virgil's birds are all silent, and the roses of Ostia are all faded. Nothing blooms two thousand years, except now and then a woman's face in the marble."

She sighed a little, heavily.

"What do you expect the Ghetto to be like?" I asked her; for it seemed terrible to me that she should have been allowed to grow up in this sort of illusion.

"Oh, I know what that is," she answered, quickly. "At least my father has told me so often, when I asked him, because it was my mother's birth-place, and must be beautiful, I thought, and I was so little when she died. He always showed me the drawings of the Portico of Octavia, and of that I could read | | 28 much, and the books all said that there were few places lovelier in Rome, and that Praxiteles's Cupid and other statues were there, and the Theatre of Marcellus and Juno's temple were close by; and so I have always seen it in my fancy, white as snow, and with many fountains, and above-head, in the open domes, the swallows flying, and now and then an eagle going across like a great cloud. Tell me,--am I not right? Is it like that? Tell me."

I turned my head away, and felt sick at heart for her,fed on these fair cruel visions, and going to the filth of Pescheria and Fiumara!

"My dear, you will always forget the roses by Ostia," I said to her. "Rome is changed. You remember the sieges she has borne, and she has had masters more cruel to her arts and her antiquity than any enemies. That great black pile you saw yonder (old to us: it is the Farnese) was built out of the ruins of the Flavian amphitheatre. The Rome you think of is no longer ours. Octavia would know no place where her foot fell, could she come back and walk by daylight through the city: by moonlight one may cheat oneself. But it is the urbs still, the caput mundi,--the capital of the world. Yes, still there is no city upon earth like Rome. Why will you hasten? Stay here by the spring of your Dioscuri and eat your figs. The sun is warm."

"No, let me see it,--all,--quickly," she said, with a restless sigh: a great troubled fear had come upon her.

If I had been a prince or cardinal, now,--or even Maryx or my friend Hilarion! but I was only Crispin the cobbler, with no more than was needed for myself and Palès, and only one room in a house hanging over Tiber and shared with half a hundred other tenants. I could do nothing,--nothing, except plod after her in the heat through the empty ways of the quarter of my friends the tanners.

Was I asleep again, and only dreaming, after all? I began to think so.

She kept walking onward through the thick white dust, with a free swift motion, tired though she was, that might have trodden grass at day-dawn and scarce brushed the dew.

In silence we approached the Doric pillars of the lower arcades of the Theatre of Marcellus; and where once the court of Augustus, shuddering, saw the evil omen of the broken curule | | 29 chair, there were only now the mules munching their fodder or straining under the whip and knife, and their mountain drivers laughing and swearing, quarreling and shrieking, and the peasant women suckling their rough, brown, clamorous babes, and the Jew peddlers slinking from stall to stall, hungry and lynx-eyed for safe bargain and barter. The great uncouth Orsini walls leaned over the pillars and jammed them down into the ground; lattices varicolored with multitudinous fluttering rags gaped between the higher Ionian columns; black yawning entrances showed piles of lumber and of rude merchandise, old copper, tattered clothes, pots and pans, cabbages and caldrons; rusty iron and smoking stews:--the tu Marcellus eris seemed to sigh through the riot of screams and oaths and mirth and fury and shouted songs and vendors' curses.

She paused in the midst of the dirt, the squalor, the pushing people, and a vague terror came into her eyes that looked up into mine with a vague distrust.

"Do you lead me right? Are you sure?"

I would have given my right hand to have been able to answer her that I led her wrong.

But what could I do? I could not build up for her out of my old leather the marble and golden city of her scholars' fancies.

I answered her almost roughly: men are often rough when they are themselves in pain.

"Yes, this is right enough. Rome has seen two thousand years of sack and siege, and fire and sword, and robbery and ruin, since the days you dream of, child. I tell you Augustus would not know one stone of all the many that he laid. His own mighty tumulus is only a grass-grown ruin; and the people chuckle there on summer nights over little comedies; you may laugh at Harlequin where Livia sat, disheveled and distraught. Hadrian could slay Apollodorus for daring to disagree with him about the height of a temple, but he could not insure his own grave from desecration and destruction; it is a fortress yonder for the fisherman of Galilee; he has a little better fate than Augustus, but not much. Pass through the market: take care, those craw-fish bite. You see the Corinthian columns all cracked and scorched? The flames did that in Titus's time. Yes, those built into that ugly church, I mean, and jammed up among those hovels. Well, that is all that you | | 30 or I or any one will ever see of the Portico of Octavia,--the one good woman of imperial Rome."

I said it roughly and brutally; I knew that as I spoke, yet I said it. Men use rude words and harsh, sometimes, by reason of the very gentleness and pity that. are in their souls.

We were in the middle of the Pescheria.

It was Friday, and there was a large supply of fish still unexhausted; rosy mullets, white soles, huge cuttle-fish, big spigole, sweet ombrini, black lobsters,--all the fish of the Tyrrhene seas were swarming everywhere and filling all the place with salt strong pungent odors. Fish by the thousands and tens of thousands, living and dying, were crowded on the stone slabs and in the stone tanks, and on the iron hooks which jutted out between corbels and architraves and pillars and head-stones massive with the might of Cæsarian Rome, and which in their day had seen Titus roll by in his chariot behind his milk-white horses, with the trumpets of the Jubilee and the veil of the Temple borne before him by his Syrian captives.

She stood in the midst of the narrow way, with the acrid smells and the writhing fish and the screaming people round her, and in the air the high arch restored by Septimius Severus, now daubed with bruised and peeling frescoes of the Christian Church; at her side was a filthy hole where a woman crimped a living quivering eel; above her head was a dusky unglazed window where an old Jew was turning over rusty locks and bars.

She stood and looked,--she who came to see the Venus of Phidias and Praxiteles's Love.

Then a death-like paleness overspread her face, an unspeakable horror took the light out of her eyes; she dropped her head and shivered as with cold in the hot Roman sunshine.

I waited silently. What could I say?

With a visible and physical ill one can deal; one can thrust a knife into a man at need, one can give a woman money for bread or masses, one can run for medicine or a priest. But for a creature with a face like Ariadne's, who had believed in the old gods and found them fables. who had sought for the old altars and found them ruins, who had dreamed of imperial Rome and found the Ghetto,--for such a sorrow as this what could one do?