Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within her recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the antiquities of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking; but they were now removed to the different museums.  Nevertheless they had still a beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if we would follow her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from the garden upon the roof of the Temple of Peace.  The assistant had not boasted without reason:  away before us stretched the Campagna, a level waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms that here and there waved like black plumes upon it, and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down from the ages across the melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the way.  The city all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, and far below us,—­on the length of the Forum over which the Appian Way stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum on the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs,—­the Past seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and animate itself anew.  The effort was more successful than that which we had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum; but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists trying to make her out with their Murrays.

In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio, where we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been kept fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia for her father.  Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her grandmother also—­an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of age, who could only weep and smile in token of her content.  I think she had but a dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible fact of Virginia’s photograph, and that she did not quite understand how we could cause it to be taken for her son.  She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders, and sighing grievously.  But the assistant’s cheerfulness could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and she made the most of the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness all the incidents of the visit to the photographer’s, and running to get the dress Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in the picture.  Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there was altogether eventless.  “Here we have a little amusement also,” she said.  “The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and then in the evening they dance.  Oh, they enjoy themselves!  I am half old (mezzo-vecchia).  I am done with these things.  But for youth, always kept down, something lively is wanted.”