Another Typical Wrong To The Old Rome, Or Rather To The Not-Yet Rome, Was The Building-Up, Beyond The Tiber, Of The Quarter Of The Fields, So Called, Where Zola In His Novel Of _Rome_ Has Placed Most Of The Squalor Which He So Lavishly Employs In Its Contrasts.

In these he shows himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in spite of himself; but after I had read his book I made it my affair to visit the scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere dei Prati.

When I did so I found that I had already passed through the quarter without noting anything especially poor or specifically miserable, and I went a third time to make sure that I had not overlooked something impressively lamentable. But I did not see above three tenement-houses with the wash hung from the windows, and with the broken shutters of poverty and misery, in a space where on the East Side or the North Side in New York I could have counted such houses by the score, almost the hundred. In this quarter the streets were swept every morning as they are everywhere in Rome, and though toward noon they were beginning to look as slovenly as our streets look when they have just been "cleaned," I knew that the next morning these worst avenues of Rome would be swept as our best never have been since the days of Waring.

Beyond the tenements the generous breadth of the new streets has been bordered by pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type, fleetingly touched but not spoiled by the taste of the _art nouveau,_ standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one could look over their garden-walls into the shrubs and flowers about them.

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