I

IT will give an idea of what ages ago those nights were, and of the youth I brought to them, if I say that I arrived in Rome on the first tandem tricycle seen in Italy.

I can look back to it with pride, for I was, in my way, a pioneer; but there was not much to be proud about at the time. Rome was so little impressed that J., my fellow pioneer, and I had scarcely shown ourselves within the gates before we were arrested for driving the tandem furiously through the Corso — as if anybody could drive anything furiously through the Corso at the hour before sunset, when all the world comes home from the Borghese. But two policemen, drawing their swords as if they meant business, commanded us to dismount, and we had to walk to the hotel, pushing the tricycle, between them; and a crowd followed; and the policemen asked us for a lira, which we refused, thinking it a proof of the corruption of modern Rome. I do not care to say for how many more we were asked a few weeks later by the Syndic, whom we could not refuse; and altogether I do not think we were to blame if, after the policemen and the swords and the crowd had gone, and the tricycle was locked up, and we wandered from the hotel in the gathering dusk, we were the two most ill-tempered young people who ever set out to enjoy their first night in Rome.

Nor was our temper improved when J.’s instinct, which in a strange place takes him straight where he wants to go, having got us into the Ghetto, failed to get us out again. The Ghetto itself was all right, — so entirely what a Ghetto ought to be, that had I been the Romans, instead of pulling it down, I should have preserved it as an historical monument: dirty, dark, and mysterious, a labyrinth of narrow, crooked streets, lined with tall grim houses, filled with melodramatic shadows with dim figures skulking in them; but a nightmare of a labyrinth which kept bringing us forever back to the same spot. And we could not dine on picturesqueness, and we would not have dined in any of the murderouslooking houses at any price; and at last J. admitted that there were times when a native might be a better guide than instinct, and in his best Italian he asked the way of two men who were passing. One, who wore the tweeds and flannel shirt by which in calmer moments we should have recognized him, pulled the other by the sleeve and growled in English: ‘Come on, don’t bother about the beastly foreigners!' I can forgive him, remembering what his incivility cost him, not only that night, when we would not let him off until he had shown us out of the Ghetto, but on a succession of our nights in Rome, Fate having neatly arranged that at the one house whose doors were opened to us he should be a constant visitor.

Other doors might have opened had we had the clothes to try them. But we had come to Rome for four days with no more luggage than the tandem could carry, and we stayed four months without, adding to it. We could have sent for our trunks, we could have bought new things in the Roman shops, but we did not; I can hardly say why, except that there was work to do, our letter of credit, was small, Youth is stern, — or, more likely, because it saved so much trouble not to.

But if we could not spend our nights in other people’s houses, neither could we in the rooms we had taken at the top of one of the highest houses on the top of one of the highest hills in Rome. There was no objection to the rooms: they were charming; but we had found them on a warm November day when the sun was streaming in through the windows that looked far and wide over the town, and beyond to the Campagna, and still beyond to a shining line of the horizon that we knew was the Mediterranean; and we did not trouble about anything but the price, which to our surprise we could meet; and so we moved in at once. Nor for days as we sat at our work in the sunlight, the windows open and Rome at our feet, did we imagine there could be anything to trouble about, unless it were to prevail upon the padrone ’s son-in-law to blow his melancholy cornet anywhere rather than on the roof over our heads.

But even in Rome the sun must set and November nights grow chill, and once, after a day of rain, when a fire would have been pleasant, we suddenly discovered that there was no place to make it in. It had never occurred to us that there could not be, newly come as we were from the land where heat in the house is as much a matter of course as a sun in the sky. At first we wrapped ourselves in shawls and blankets, hired the padrona’s biggest scaldino, and called it an experience. After a few evenings we decided that it was an experience we could do without, and, like all miserable Romans who have no fireplaces, we settled down to spending our nights in the restaurants and caffès of Rome.

I doubt if I should care to spend my nights that way now; a quarter of a century has added unexpected charm to a dinner-table and fireside of my own; but no Arabian Nights could then have been fuller of entertainment than the Roman Nights that drove us out in search of warmth and food. In Philadelphia there never had been a suspicion of adventure about my dinner. It was as inevitable as six o’clock, and as inevitably eaten in the seclusion of the Philadelphia second-story backbuilcling dining-room, if not of my family, then of one or another of my friends. In Rome it. became a delightful uncertainty that transformed the six flights of stairs leading to it from our rooms into the ‘Road to Anywhere.’ That, road was by no means an easy one to climb up again, and, if we could help it, we never climbed down more than once a day, usually toward dusk, a few hours earlier when we were in holiday mood, but always in time for a tramp before dinner. If we came to a church, we dropped into it, or a gallery, or a palace, or a garden. We followed the streets wherever they might lead, — the brand-new Via Nazionale to the Forum, or the narrow alleys to St. Peter’s, or beyond the gates to the Campagna, — seeing a good deal of Rome without setting out to see anything. When we were hungry, we stopped at the first trattoria we passed, provided it looked as if we could afford it, and the chance dinner in a chance place at a chance hour was a bigger adventure than any that, crowded the way to it.

One night our trattoria happened to be the Posta in a narrow street back of the Piazza Colonna. It was small; not more than twenty could have dined there together in comfort. It was clean, and the padrone, his son, and the one waiter greeted us with that enchanting smile to which, during my first year in Italy, I was a ready victim. Once we had dined at the Posta, we found it so pleasant that we fell into the habit of getting hungry in its neighborhood. I have since known more famous or pretentious restaurants, but never have dinners tasted so good as at this little Roman trattoria where we had to consider the centesimi in the price of every dish, and the quarter of a flask of cheap Chianti shared between us was an extravagance, and we ate with the appetite that came of having eaten nothing all day save rolls and coffee for breakfast, and fruit and rolls lor lunch, that we might afford a dinner.

And I have dined in restaurants of gilded and mirrored magnificence, but in none that I thought so well decorated as the Posta, with its bare walls and coarse linen and no ornament, except the stand in the centre where we could pick out our fruit, or our vegetable, or our fish still squirming in proof of its freshness. Nor has any restaurant, gorgeous with the creations of Paquin and Worth, seemed more brilliant than the Posta filled with officers. In Philadelphia I had never seen an officer in uniform in my life; at the Posta I saw hardly anything else. We were surrounded by lieutenants and captains and colonels, and as I watched them pass in and out, with clank and clatter of spurs and swords, and military salutes at the door, and military cloaks thrown dramatically off and on, and gold braid shining, I began to think a big standing army worth the money to any country, on condition it always go in uniform. But it was when the old, spare, grizzled General, always the last, appeared, and they all rose upon his entrance, that our dinner was dignified into a ceremony. Sometimes I fancied he felt his importance more than anybody, for he is the only man I have ever known, courageous enough in public to begin his dinner with cake and finish it with soup.

Now and then, on special occasions, when we had sent off an article or received a cheque, we went to the Falcone and celebrated the event by feasting on Maccheroni alla Napolitana, Cinghiale all’ Agra Dolce, and wine of Orvieto. The Falcone, another accident of our tramps, though we afterwards found it in Baedeker, was I should be afraid to say how many centuries old, and it looked as ancient. Indeed it was such a shabby, sombre crypt of a restaurant that I accepted the tradition it cherished of itself as a haunt of the Cæsars, and believed the waiters when they pointed to the mark of the Imperial head on the greasy walls, just as the waiters of the Cheshire Cheese in London point to the mark of Dr. Johnson’s, while the flamboyancy of the cooking revealed to me the real reason of the decline and fall of Rome. It might be the story of our own decline and fall I should have to tell, had we sent off articles and received cheques every day. But fortunately it was a long time between feasts, and now never, never again can our digestions, or the Cæsars’, be imperiled at the Falcone, for they tell me it has gone with the Ghetto and many other things in the Rome I knew and loved.

II

By the middle of the winter we gave up the Posta, not only for special occasions but for every day, and went to the Cavour. I don’t know how we had the heart to, for the Cavour never had the same charm, we never got to like it so well. It was too large and popular for friendliness, the officers dined in a room apart, and the padrone and his waiters were too busy for more than one fixed smile of general welcome. But then, if we paid for our dinner there by the month, it cost us next to nothing by the day, and our letter of credit allowed as narrow a margin for sentiment as for clothes. Besides, the dinner was good as well as cheap; and when the streets of Rome were rivers of rain, as they often were that winter, it was brought to us in a dinner-pail by a waiter, after he had first come half a mile with the menu; and in our cold rooms, wrapped in blankets, a scaldino at our feet, a newspaper for tablecloth, we made a picnic of it, freezing, but thankful not to be drowned. And on great holidays, the padrone spared us a smile all to ourselves as he offered us, with the compliments of the season, a plate of torrone and a bottle of old wine from his vineyard.

With dinner the night was but beginning, and smiles must have faded had we lingered over it indefinitely. But I learned, to my astonishment, that hours could be, or rather were expected to be, devoted to one small cup of coffee, and that always near the trattoria was a caffè which provided the coffee and, at the cost of a few cents, was our home for as long and as late as might suit us. In Philadelphia after-dinner coffee had been swallowed promptly, in the front or back parlor, according as there was company or not; in Rome it was an excuse to loaf, for people with apparently nothing to do and all their time to do it in. I suspected something wrong in so agreeable a custom, as youth usually does in the pleasant things of life; and at first, when we went to the ancient Greco,

I tried to believe that it was because of J.’s interest in a place where artists had drunk coffee for generations. When we gave the Greco up because nobody went there any longer save a few gray-bearded old men and a few gold-laced hall-porters, and transferred our patronage to a brand-new caffè in the Corso, that called itself in French the Café de Venise, and in English the Meet of Best Society, I pretended that it was because we could there see the Daily News, for which Andrew Lang was writing the leaders everybody was reading. But Lang could not reconcile us to the nightly Gran Concerto of a piano, a flute, and a violin concealed in a thicket of artificial trees; and the Best Society meant tourists, and we shocked a family of New England friends by inviting them to share its tawdry pleasures; and when after this, finding we could stand it no longer, we exchanged it for a caffè without a past and with no aspirations as the Meet of any save the usual caffè society of a big Italian town, I gave up hunting for excuses and devoted myself to nights of idleness and coffee with as little scruple as the natives.

The caffè we chose was the Nazionale Aragnos in the Corso, the largest and most gorgeous in Rome. Three or four rooms opened one out of the other with a magnificence that we could never have achieved at home, and would not if we could, and a succession of mirrors multiplied them indefinitely. We leaned against blue plush, gilding glittered wherever gilding could on white walls, waiters rushed about with shining nickel-plated trays held above their heads, spurs and swords clanked and clattered; before the end of the evening not a table was vacant. It was only the usual big Continental caffeè but to me as strange as everything in the wonderful life in the wonderful world into which I had strayed from the familiar ways of Philadelphia.

To the marble-topped tables, to the gilding, mirrors, and plush, novelty lent a charm they have never had since, and might soon have lost had we been left to contemplate them in solitary state, as at first it seemed probable we should. For we knew nobody in Rome except Sandro, the youthful Roman cyclist we had picked up on the road, who amiably showed us the hospitality of the capital by occasionally drinking coffee with us at our expense, and once introducing a friend, a tall, slim, good-looking young man of such elegance of manner and such a princely air of condescension, that Sandro himself was impressed and looked in again the same evening to explain our privilege in having entertained the Queen’s hair-dresser unawares.

Foreigners did not often stray into the Nazionale. They were almost as few in number as women, and women were very few, for as they never dined, — or so I gathered from my experience at the Posta, the Falcone, and the Cavour, — they never drank coffee, though on Sundays they descended upon the caffè with their husbands and children, and devoured ices and cakes at a rate that convinced me that they devoured little else from one Sunday to the next. When I asked for the Times, which they took at the Nazionale, the waiter invariably answered: ‘It reads itself, the Signore Tedesco has it’; and the Signore Tedesco, a mild German student who for his daily lesson in English read the advertisement columns from beginning to end, was the only foreigner who appeared regularly at any table but our own. And yet at ours, before I could say how it came about, a little group collected, and every evening in the furthest room, J. and I were holding an informal reception which gave us all the advantages of social life and none of its responsibilities. We could preside in the travel-worn tweeds of cycling, and not bother because we were not dressed; we could welcome our friends the more cordially because as we did not provide the entertainment it was no offense to us if they did not like it, nor to them if we failed to sit it out. In the caffè we found the ‘oblivion of care,’ the ‘freedom from solitude,’ though not the big words to express it, which Dr. Johnson ‘experienced’ in a tavern. Were all social functions run on the same broad principles, society would not be the strain it is upon everybody’s patience and purse.

III

Almost all the group were artists. Some lived in Rome; others, like ourselves, were there for the winter; others were just passing through. Artists were then as great a novelty to me as the caffè, — I had been married so short a time that J. had not ceased to be a problem, if he ever has, — and nothing was more amazing to me than the talk. They talked as if talk were the chief business of life; but while they had so much to say that it made me grateful I was born a listener, they had only one subject to say it about. It was art from the moment we met until we parted, though we sat over our coffee for hours. Often it was next morning when J. and I reached the house at the top of the hill, and he dragged the huge key from his pocket, undid the ponderous lock, and struck the overgrown match, or undersized candle, by which the Roman who had six flights to climb lit himself to bed; and, having only the one supplied by the restaurant, we hurried upstairs as fast as we could go, lest it might not last.

And the talk was bewildering, revolutionary, to anybody who had never heard art talked about by artists. All I had thought right turned out to be wrong, all I had never thought of was right, all that to the critic of art was essential had nothing to do with it. History, dates, periods, schools, sentiment, meaning, — attributions had just begun to be heard of,—were not worth discussion or thought. The concern was for art as a trade — the trade which creates beauty; the vital questions were quality, color, values, tone, mediums. The price of pictures, the gains of artists, the things in artists’ talk to-day, were never mentioned; rather, those who sold were looked down upon. There were nights when I went away believing that nothing mattered in the world except the ground on a copper plate or the grain of a canvas.

But though the talkers might be of a hundred opinions as to the meaning of right and wrong, though they might wrangle over mediums until the German student looked up in reproof from his columns of advertisements and the Romans shrugged their shoulders at the short tempers of the forestieri, they were of one mind as to the supreme importance of art. If I ventured to disagree —which I was far too timid to do often — they were down upon me like a flash, abusing me for being so blind as not to see the truth in Rome, of all places, where of a tremendous past nothing was left but the work of the masters who built and adorned the city, or who sang and chronicled its splendors.

The noise of their talk is still loud in my ears, but many of the talkers have grown dim in my memory. Of some of the older men I cannot recall the faces, or even the names; some of the younger I remember better, partly, I suppose, because they were young and starting out in life with us, partly because one or two later on made their names heard of outside the Nazionale and Rome. The Young Architect was getting ready to make his known in Philadelphia, and the knowledge of the Beaux-Arts could not have served him so well as his conviction that the architecture of Europe had waited for him to discover it. He had never been abroad before and he could not believe that anybody else had. He would come to our little corner, from his prowls in Rome, and tell men, who had been there for more years than he had days, all about the churches and palaces and galleries, as I can fancy Columbus telling the Spaniards at home about the wonders of the New World. But the older men listened patiently and spared his illusions, no doubt hearing in his the voice of their own foolish youth calling. He carried his confidence back home with him unspoiled, and his first building — a hospital or something of the kind — was a monument to his discoveries, beginning on the ground floor as the Strozzi Palace, developing into various French châteaux, and finishing on the top as a Swiss châlet: atrocious as architecture, but amusing as autobiography. All his buildings were more or less reminiscent, telling again in stone the story so often told in words at the Nazionale, for Death was kind and claimed him before he had ceased to be the discoverer, to become himself.

Donoghue too has gone, Donoghue the sculptor who, as I knew him in Rome, was overflowing with life, young, — he would never have grown old no matter how long he might have lived, — big, handsome, and so gay that wherever he went laughter went with him. His discovery was of Paris and the Latin Quarter, but it had filled a year between Chicago and Rome, and he had had time to work off his fantastic exuberance as discoverer. ‘Donoghue is all right,’ they would say of him at the Nazionale; ‘he has got past brass buttons and pink swallow-tails, even if he does cling to low collars and tight pants and Oscar,’ Certainly, he had got so far as to think he ought to be beginning to work, and he was in despair because he could not find in Rome a youth as beautiful as himself to pose for his Young Sophocles. He would drop into the Nazionale to report his want of progress, and in our rambles we often met him upon his search for a model. He referred to his beauty with the simplicity and vanity of a child — a real Post-Impressionist, without the struggle. Indeed, he was a child in everything, with the schoolboy’s sense of fun. I never knew him happier than the evening he hurried to the caffè from his visit to the Coliseum by moonlight, to tell us of his joke on the Americans he found waiting there in silence for the guide to say that the moon was in the proper place for emotion. A friend was with him. ‘I said, “Sprichst du deutsch ? ” very loud as we passed,’ was Donoghue’s story, ‘and he answered as loud “Nichtsl Nichts !” and of course the Americans took us for Germans. Then we hid ourselves in the shadows a little further on and we both yelled together at the top of our voices, “Three cheers for Cleveland!” and the Americans jumped, and they forgot the moon, and they would n’t listen to the guide, and I tell you it was just great’; and he roared with laughter until I was sure that even the mild German would protest. He was as enchanted with his method of learning Italian. He was reading Wilkie Collins and Bret Harte in an Italian translation, and when he yawned in our faces and left the caffe early, it was because the night before the Dago’s Woman in White or Luck of Boaring Camp had kept him up until dawn, though really it was a waste of time since anybody had only to get him half seas over and he would talk any lingo in the world. Eventually he posed for himself, tired of his hunt for a model and also perhaps because he always spent his quarter’s allowance the day he got it, and most models could not wait three months to be paid. After that he joined us less often. But for me, in memory, he would dominate the group in our corner of the Nazionale, had it not been for Forepaugh.

Who Forepaugh was I did not know then, I do not know now. I do not think anybody ever knew except that he was Forepaugh, which meant, according to his own reckoning, the most wonderful person on earth. He was one of the men whose habit it is to turn up in whatever part of the world you may happen to be, with no apparent reason for being there except to talk to you; and as it is years since he has turned up anywhere to talk to us, I fear he has joined the Philadelphia Architect and Donoghue, where he will talk no more. In sheer physical power of speech he was without a rival, and none surpassed him in appreciation of his own eloquence. His interest never flagged so long as he held the floor, though when we wanted him to listen to us, he did not attempt to conceal his indifference. We could not tell him anything, for there was nothing about which he did not know more than we could hope to. He, at any rate, had no doubt of his omniscience. Judging from the intimate details with which he regaled us, he was equally in the confidence of the Vatican and the Quirinal. The secrets of the Roman aristocracy were his, he was the first to hear the scandals of the foreign colony. The opera depended upon his patronage and balls languished without him, though I could never understand how or why, so rarely did he leave us to enjoy them. Every archæologist, every scholar, every historian in Rome appealed to him; and as for art, it was folly for others to pretend to speak of it in his presence.

He called himself an artist, and for a time he used to go with J. to Gigi’s, the life school where artists in Rome often went of an afternoon to draw from the model. But J. never saw him there with as much as a scrap of paper or a pencil in his hands, and nobody ever saw him at work anywhere. For what he did not do, he made up by telling of what he could do. His were the pictures unpainted which, like the songs unsung, are always the finest. He condescended to approve of the Old Masters, assured that the masterpieces he might choose to produce must rank with theirs; but he never forgot the great gulf fixed between himself and the Modern Masters, whose pictures were worthy of his approval only when he had been their inspiration. It was fortunate for American art that scarcely an American artist could be named whom Forepaugh had not inspired.

Like all talkers who know too much, Forepaugh had what Carlyle called a terrible faculty for developing into a bore. Some of our group would run when they saw him at the door, others took malicious pleasure in interrupting him and suddenly changing the conversation in the hope to catch him tripping. But out of all such tests he came triumphantly. I never thought him more wonderful than the evening when somebody abruptly began to talk about Theosophy in the middle of one of his confidences about the Italian Court. It was no use. Without stopping to take breath, Forepaugh began to tell us the most marvelous theosophical adventures, which he knew, not by hearsay, but because he had passed through them himself. We might express an opinion: he stated facts. And it seemed that he had no more intimate friend than Sinnett, and that to Sinnett he had confessed his skepticism, asking for a sign, a manifestation, and that one afternoon when they were smoking over their coffee and cognac after lunch in Sinnett’s chambers, then on the third floor of a house near the end of Bond Street, — Forepaugh was exact in detail,—Sinnett smiled mysteriously, but said nothing except to warn him to hold on tight to the table. And up rose the table, with the litter of coffee-cups, cigars, and cognac, up rose the two chairs, one at either end, with Sinnett and Forepaugh sitting on them, and they floated out of the open window — it was a June afternoon — and along Bond Street, above the carriages and the hansoms and the omnibuses and the people, as far as Piccadilly, round the lamp-post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window. “‘Hold on,” said Sinnett, and I never held on to anything as tight in my life as I did to that table,’ said Forepaugh in conclusion. He always reminded me of the man who annoyed my uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or bigger than anybody else. ‘Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant in my back-yard,’ my uncle used to say, ‘he would at once invite me to see the mastodon in his.’ Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for everybody else’s elephant.

If Forepaugh gave us a deal of information we had no use for, he was really a good fellow whom we should have missed from our table. And it was through him that J. and I were first made welcome in that one house open to us, to which I have been all this time in coming. For it was Forepaugh who told Vedder we were in Rome, and Vedder, once he knew it, would not hear of our shutting his door in our own faces, nor would Mrs. Vedder, whatever the condition of our wardrobe. Vedder may have revealed many things in his recent Digressions but not the extent of the hospitality he and his wife showed to the American who was a stranger in Rome, where then already they had been long at home. And not only to the American. Often as we went to them, we never found them alone, and never was the group at their fireside without a foreigner or two. The first person we were introduced to on the first visit was the Englishman who would have deserted us in the Ghetto, and who looked as if he wished the Vedders had learned to be less indiscriminate in their hospitality. We had the satisfaction of knowing that we made him supremely uncomfortable. He scowled upon us then, and continued to through the winter. He could not forgive us for having found him out, and was evidently afraid we were going to tell everybody about it. He was something very learned and was writing a book on Ancient Rome; later he became something more important at South Kensington. But no degree of learning and importance helped him to forget, or, anyway, to forgive. At chance meetings, years afterwards, in London, he scowled, as no doubt he would still, had he not long since gone to the land where I hope all scowls are smoothed from his scowling brow.

If he scowled, there was another Englishman who smiled: an elderly man with the imperturbable serenity of a Buddha. He also had written books, but I never knew their names and now I have forgotten his, and it would spoil my impression of him if I knew or remembered. For when I was in Rome he had risen above activity and toil to the contemplative life, and, I suppose, to the income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to me. Men could not be happy without sunshine. The sun was house, food, clothes, furniture, everything; and as most of the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any price, he lived in Rome, where almost all the year it was his for nothing. He sat on the Pincian or in other gardens during the day, doing nothing in the sunshine — that was living. And he urged me to follow his example and not to wait until half my life had been wasted in the pursuit of happiness where it was not to be found. He may have been right, but I never needed to become a philosopher to value the virtue of indolence, though I have never had the money to pay for it. Any man has the ability to do nothing, a great authority has said, and I can answer for one woman who has more than her fair share of that ability.

As regular a visitor was a huge longbearded Norwegian, who looked a prophet and was an artist, and who spent most of the winter in the study of Marion Crawford’s novels, — I cannot imagine why, as they roused him to fury. ‘Marion Crawford,’ he would thunder at us; ‘bah! He is a weak imitator of Bulwer, that is all, and he has not Bulwer’s power of construction. He is not Bulwer. No. He is a weakling. Bah!' My only quarrel with Marion Crawford’s books was that they never excited emotion in me, one way or the other, and I was so puzzled by his excitement that I went to the trouble of looking up Mr. Isaacs and The Roman Singer at Piali’s in the Piazza di Spagna, where I had shortly before asked for Pepys’s Diary and been offered Marcus Ward’s. But the learning of the store could supply Marion Crawford, and I re-read the two novels and understood less than ever the Norseman’s rage.

We were as certain to find this fiery critic and the two Englishmen any night we called as we were to find Vedder. Other men came and went, among them a few Italians and Frenchmen and more Americans, but none could have appeared so regularly, so much fainter is the impression they have left with me. They were mostly artists, and at Vedder’s, as at the caffè, the talk was chiefly of art. There was little of his work to see, for his studio was some distance from his apartment. But it was enough to see Vedder himself or, for that matter, to hear him. In his house he led the talk, even Forepaugh having small chance against him. He was the most prolific, the most determined, the most animated of talkers. It was stimulating just to watch him talk. He was never still, he rarely sat down, he was always moving about, walking up and down, at times breaking into song, at times into dance. He was then in his prime, large, with a fine expressive face, and as American in his voice, in his manner, in his humor, as if he had never crossed the Atlantic. He had recently finished the illustrations for the Rubaiyat, and the book was published while we were in Rome. It was never long out of his talk. He would tell us the history of every design, and of every model or pot in it. He exulted in the stroke of genius by which he had invented a composition or a pose. I have heard him describe again and again how he drew the flight of a spirit from a model outstretched and flopping up and down on a feather-bed laid upon the studio floor, until she almost fainted from fatigue, while he worked from a hammock slung above.

I recall his delight when a friend of Fitzgerald’s sent him Fitzgerald’s photograph with many compliments, asking for his in return; and when Dr. Chamberlain, while filling a difficult tooth for the Queen, sang the praises of the Rubaiyat until she ordered a copy of the édition de luxe. In looking back, I always seem to see Mrs. Vedder pasting notices into a scrap-book, and to hear Vedder declaiming quatrains from the Rubaiyat, and telling stories about it. There was one evening when he came to a dead stop in his walk and his talk, and shaking a dramatic finger at us, said, ‘I tell you what it is. I am not Vedder. I am Omar Khayyam!’ ‘No,’ drawled the voice of a disgusted artist who had not got a w?ord in for more than an hour, ‘No, you’re not. You’re the great I am!’

Vedder laughed with the rest, but I am not sure he liked it. He was sensitive to criticism, though he carried it off with a laugh. Clarence Cook v’as one of the critics of his Omar who offended him. ‘It’s funny,’ Vedder said, ‘all my life I’ve hurt Clarence’s feelings. He always has been sure I have done my work for no other reason than to irritate him, and now that’s the way he feels about the Omar.’ The laugh was not so ready when Lang — I think it was Lang — wrote that Vedder’s Omar Khayyam was not of Persia, but of Skaneateles. And after I suggested that it was really of Rome, and some mistaken friend at home sent my article to Vedder, I never thought him quite so cordial.

IV

And so the winter passed. For us there was always a refuge from our cold rooms at the caffè or at Vedder’s; very occasionally with friends we stumbled upon unexpectedly during our rambles; and once in a while with new friends, made I have forgotten how — though I have not forgotten that it was in Rome we first met Miss Harriet Waters Preston, who accepted us, cycling tweeds and all, notwithstanding the shock of our shabbiness to the admirably appointed pension where she stayed. There were also nights when the affairs of Rome drew us from the caffè. I remember once our little group interrupted their interminable arguments long enough to see the Tiber in flood, down by the Ripetta, where people were going about in boats and Rome looked like the Venice to which I had then never been, and we met Humbert and Margherita driving down alone in an American trotting-wagon so as to show their sympathy; for, whatever they may not have done, they always appeared in person when their people were in trouble. Not so many weeks before, we had watched the enthusiasm with which the Romans greeted Humbert on his return from visiting the cholerastricken town of Naples. And I remember, too, on Befana Night, adjourning to the Piazza Navona to blow horns and reed whistles into other people’s ears and to have them blown into ours.

For the humors of the Carnival there was no need to leave the caffè, where one Pulcinello after another broke into our talk with witticisms that kept the caffè in an uproar, and for me destroyed whatever sentiment there might have been in the thought that this was my last night in Rome — the last of the wonderful nights when I learned my folly in ever having believed that anything in the world mattered, that anything in the world existed, save art.

Pulcinello went with us from Rome, following us to Naples, and saving us from homesickness for the rooms full of sunshine at the top of the high house on the top of the high hill, and for the blue plush and the gilding and the mirrors and the talk of the Nazionale. And Pulcinello went with us to Pompeii, reappearing during our nights at the Albergo del Sole, that most delightful and impossible of all the inns that ever were. It may have vanished in the quarter of a century that has passed since the February day I came to it, when the sky was as blue as the sea, and a soft cloud hung over Vesuvius, and flowers were sweet in the land. But Pompeii could never be the same without it. It was made for our shabbiness; its three tumbleddown little houses ranged round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom without lock or latch, and with a mirror cracked from side to side, like the Lady of Shalott’s, though for other reasons; the dining-room with earthen floor, and walls decorated by a modernprimitive fresco of the padrone holding a plate of maccheroni in one hand, a flask of Lacrima Christi in the other; and a central column spreading out branches like a tree, bearing for fruit row upon row of still uncorked bottles; and a door open to all the stray monks and beggars of Pompeii —to all the fowls, too, including the gorgeous peacock that strolled in after its evening walk with the young Swiss artist on the flat roof of the inn where, together, they went before dinner to watch the sunset.

Throughout dinner, at the head of the long table where we sat with the Swiss artist and an old German professor of art and an older Italian archæologist, the talk was of art. While we helped ourselves from that amazing dish into which you stuck a fork and pulled out a bit of chicken or duck or beef or mutton or sausage; while the old professor and archæologist absentmindedly stretched a hand to the column behind them, and plucked from it bottle after bottle of wine; while the beggars whined at the open door, and the monks begged at our side, and Pulcinello capered and jested and sang; while the American tourists at the other end of the table deplored the disorder and noise until we sent them the longest and most expensive way up Vesuvius to get rid of them; while the fowls fought for the crumbs, — the talk was still of art, and again of art, in the end as in the beginning. I might not understand half of it, coming as it did in a confused torrent of German, Italian, French, and English, but the nights at the Sole, like the nights at the Nazionale, made this one truth clear: that nothing matters in the world, that nothing exists in the world, save art.