chaperones, and olive-cheeked, huge-checked jeunesse dorée, evidently seeking for pretty faces as for pearls of great price, as is the manner of the jeunesse dorée of the Eternal City; while down upon the scene looks a succession of dwelling-houses, a gray-walled convent or two, one of the stateliest palaces of Rome—now let out in apartments and hiding in obscure rooms the last two impoverished descendants of a proud race that helped to impoverish Rome—one or two more prosperous palaces, and a venerable church, looking like a sleepy watchman of Zion suffering the enemy to do as it will before his closed eyes.

WHAT A ROMAN BUYS FOR TWO CENTS IN THE ETERNAL CITY.

WHAT A FOREIGNER BUYS FOR TWO CENTS IN THE ETERNAL CITY.

On the other side is the vicolo, dark of wall and dank of pavement, with petticoats and shirts dangling from numerous windows and fluttering like gibbeted wretches in the air; with frowzy women sewing or knitting in the sombre doorways and squalid urchins screaming everywhere; with humble vegetables and cheap wines exposed for sale in dirty windows; with usually a carriage or two undergoing a washing at some stable-door; and with almost always an amorous Romeo or two from some brighter region wandering hopefully to and fro amid the unpicturesque gloom of this Roman lane to catch a wafted kiss or a dropped letter from the rear window of his Juliet's home. For nowhere else in Europe, Asia, America, the Oceanic Archipelago or the Better Land can the Romeo-and-Juliet business be more openly and freely carried on than in the by-streets of the Eternal City, where girls are thought to be as jealously secluded from the monster Man as are the women of a Turkish seraglio or the nuns of a European convent. These Romeos and Juliets usually seem quite indifferent to the number of unsympathetic eyes that watch their little drama, providing only Papa and Mamma Capulet are kept in the dark in the shop below. Even the observation of Signor and Signora Montague would disturb them little, for it is only Juliet who is guarded, and Romeo is evidently expected to get all the fun out of life he can. In their dingy vicolo the Leatherstonepaughs have seen three Romeos watching three windows at the same twilight moment. One of them stood under an open window in the third story, from whence a line was dropped down to receive the letter he held in his hand. Just as the letter-weighted line was drawn up a window immediately below Juliet's was thrown violently open, and an unromantic head appeared to empty vials of wrath upon the spectacled Romeo below for always hanging about the windows of the silly pizzicarole girls above and giving the house a ridiculous appearance in the eyes of the passers-by. Romeo answered audaciously that the signora was mistaken in the man, that he had never been under that window before in his life, had never seen the Signorina Juliet, daughter of Capulet the pizzicarole who lived above, but that he was merely accompanying his friend Romeo, who loved Juliet the daughter of the drochiere who lived a story below, and who was now wooing her softly two or three windows away. A shriek was his response as the wrathful head disappeared, while the lying Romeo laughed wickedly and the Leatherstonepaughs immoderately, in spite of themselves, to see Juliet, daughter of the drochiere, electrically abstracted from her window as if by the sudden application of a four-hundred-enraged-mother-power to her lofty chignon from behind, while the three Romeos, evidently all strangers to each other, folded their tents like the Arab and silently stole away.

ROMEO.

JULIET.

The Leatherstonepaughs always suspected that no lordly race, from father's father to son's son, had ever dwelt in their immense palace. They suspected rather that it was, like many another mighty Roman pile, reared by plebeian gains to shelter noble Romans fair and proud whom Fate confined to economical "flats," and whose wounded pride could best be poulticed by the word palazzo.

Hans Christian Andersen knew this palace well, and has described it as the early home of his Improvisatore. In those days two fountains tinkled, one within, the other just outside, the dusky iron-barred basement. One fountain, however, has ceased to flow, and now if a passer-by peeps in at the grated window, whence issue hot strong vapors and bursts of merry laughter, he will see a huge stone basin into whose foaming contents one fountain drips, and over which a dozen washerwomen bend and pound with all their might and main in a bit of chiaroscuro that reminds one of Correggio.

Over this Correggio glimpse wide stone stairs lead past dungeon-like doors up five flights to the skylighted roof. Each of these doors has a tiny opening through which gleams a watchful eye and comes the sound of the inevitable "Chi è?" whenever the doorbell rings, as if each comer were an armed marauder strayed down from the Middle Ages, who must be well reconnoitred before the fortress-gates are unbarred.

THE COURT OF THE LEATHERSTONEPAUGHS' PALACE.

It was in the ultimo piano that the Leatherstonepaughs pitched their lodge in a vast wilderness of colorful tiled roofs, moss-grown and lichen-laden, amid a forest of quaintly-shaped and smokeless chimneys. Their floors, guiltless of rugs or carpets, were of earthen tiles and worn into hollows where the feet of the palace-dwellers passed oftenest to and fro. A multitude of undraped windows opened like doors upon stone balconies, whither the inhabitants flew like a startled covey of birds every time the king and queen drove by in the street below, and upon which they passed always from room to room. The outer balcony looks down upon the Piazza Barberini and its famous Spouting Triton, with an horizon-line over the roofs broken by gloomy stone-pines and cypresses that seem to have grown from the buried griefs of Rome's dead centuries. The inner balcony overlooks the court, where through the wide windows of every story, amid the potted plants and climbing vines that never take on a shade of pallor in an Italian winter, and that adorn every Roman balcony, one could see into the penetralia of a dozen Roman families and wrest thence the most vital secrets—even to how much Romano Alfredo drank at dinner or whether lemon-juice or sour wine gave piquancy to Rosina's salad. Entirely unacquainted with these descendants of ancient patrician or pleb, the Leatherstonepaughs ventilated original and individual theories concerning them, and gave them names of their own choosing.