I Could Not Tell My Proud Young Double That We Were One, And That I Was Going In The Archbishop's Red Coach As Well; He Would Never Have Believed It Of My Gray Hairs And Sunken Figure.

I could not even ask him what had become of the grocer near by, whom I used to get

Some homely supplies of, perhaps eggs or oranges, or the like, when I came out in the December mornings, and who, when I said that it was very cold, would own that it was _un poco rigidetto,_ or a little bit stiffish. The ice on the pavement, not clean-swept as now, but slopped and frozen, had been witness of that; the ice was gone and the grocer with it; and where really was I? At the window up there, or leaning against the apse of the church opposite? What church was it, anyway? I never knew; I never asked. Why should I insist upon a common identity with a man of twenty-seven to whom my threescore and ten could only bring perplexity, to say the least, and very likely vexation? I went away from Via del Gambero, where the piety of the reader will seek either of myselves in vain. In my earlier date one used to see the red legs of the French soldiers about the Roman streets, and the fierce faces of the French officers, fierce as if they felt themselves wrongfully there and were braving it out against their consciences. Very likely they had no conscience about it; they had come there over the dead body of the Roman Republic at the will of their rascal president, and they were staying there by the will of their rascal emperor, to keep on his throne the pope from whom the Italians had hoped for unity and liberty. No one is very much to blame for anything, I suppose, and very likely Pius IX. had not voluntarily disappointed his countrymen, who may have expected too much. But then the French had been there fifteen years, and were to be there another fifteen years yet. Now they are gone, with the archbishop's red coach, and the complaisant grocer, and the young man of twenty-seven in Via del Gambero, and the rest of the things that the sun looked on and will look on the like of again, no doubt, in our monotonous round of him.

To-day, instead of the red legs of the French soldiers, you see the blue legs of the Italian soldiers, and instead of the fierce faces of their officers, the serious, intelligent, mostly spectacled faces of the Italian officers, in sweeping cloaks of tender blue verging on lavender. They are soldierly men none the less for their gentler aspect, and perhaps something the more; and a better thing yet is that there are comparatively few of them. There are few of the privates also, far fewer than the priests and the students of the ecclesiastical schools, who dress like priests and go dashing through the streets in files and troops.

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