You Always Wanted A Heavy Coat For Driving Or For The Shade In Walking; Otherwise The Temperature Was That Of A New England April Which Was Resolved To Begin As It Could Carry Out.

But March came with cold rains of whole days, and with suns that might overheat but could not be trusted to warm you.

The last Sunday of January I found ice in the Colosseum; but that was the only time I saw ice anywhere in Rome. In March, however, in a moment of great exasperation from the mountains, it almost snowed. Yet that month would in our climate have been remembered for its beauty and for a prevailing kindness of temperature. The worst you could say of it was that it left the spring in the Capuchin garden where it found it. But possibly, since the temporal power was overthrown, the seasons are neglected and indifferent. Certainly man seems so in the case of the Capuchin convent. Great stretches of the poor old plain edifice look vacant, and the high wall which encloses it is plastered and painted with huge advertisements of clothiers and hotels and druggists, and announcements of races and other events out of keeping with its character and tradition.

The sentimentalists who overrun Rome from all the Northern lands will tell you that this is of a piece with all the Newer Rome which has sprung into existence since the Italian occupation. Their griefs with the thing that is are loud and they are long; but I, who am a sentimentalist too, though of another make, do not share them.

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