It must have been very amusing; and what strokes there were for a man of self-possession to make!" However, all at once, as he raised his head, he saw before him the Quartiere dei Prati--the new district of the castle fields; and his face thereupon changed: he again became an artist, indignant with the modern abominations with which old Rome had been disfigured.

His eyes paled, and a curl of his lips expressed the bitter disdain of a dreamer whose passion for the vanished centuries was sorely hurt: "Look, look at it all!" he exclaimed.

"To think of it, in the city of Augustus, the city of Leo X, the city of eternal power and eternal beauty!" Pierre himself was thunderstruck.

The meadows of the Castle of Sant' Angelo, dotted with a few poplar trees, had here formerly stretched alongside the Tiber as far as the first slopes of Monte Mario, thus supplying, to the satisfaction of artists, a foreground or greenery to the Borgo and the dome of St.Peter's.

But now, amidst the white, leprous, overturned plain, there stood a town of huge, massive houses, cubes of stone-work, invariably the same, with broad streets intersecting one another at right angles.