Italian Journeys

nd rubbish, but I was not prepared to find them so. I learned that I had all along secretly hoped for some dignity of neighborho

nce church; then a height of vaulted brick-work, and, leading on to the Coliseum, another arch, and then incoherent columns overthrown and mixed with dilapidated walls-mere phonographic consonants, dumbly representing the past, out of which all vocal glory had departed. The Coliseum itself does not much better express a

glad to get altogether away from it after a first look at the ruins in the Forum, and to take refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, where we were charged to see the little Virginia G. The Conservatorio, though a charitable institution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants as its name would imply, but none of the many young girls there were the children of rich men. They were often enough of parentage actually hungry

ded that there was, perhaps, something so unusually reassuring to the recluses in his appearance and manner that they had not thought it necessary to behave very rigidly. It later occurred to this gentleman that the promptness with which the pretty mendicants procured him an interview with the Superior had a flavor of self-interest in; and that he who came to the Conservatorio in the place of a father might have been for a moment ignorantly viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From whatever danger there was in this error the Superior soon appeared to rescue him, and we were invited into a more ceremonious apartment on the first floor, and the l

he smell of the frugal dinners of generations of mendicants in it. The assistant was very proud of the neatness of every thing, and was glad to talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It appeared that the girls were taught reading, writing, and plain sewing when they were y

s any one ev

reet. If an honest young man falls in love with one of them going by, he comes to the Superior, and describes her as well as he c

hing odd in the whole business, insomuch th

but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments of antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner, trickling from

gna, a level waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms that here and there waved like black plumes upon it, and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down from the ages across the melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the way. The city all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, and far below us,-on the length of the Forum over which the Appian Way stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Se

that she did not quite understand how we could cause it to be taken for her son. She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders, and sighing grievously. But the assistant's cheerfulness could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and she made the most of the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness all the incidents of the visit to the photographer's, and running to get the dress Virgin

ost the only natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life whi