These mystic fountains broke out for me elsewhere, again and again, I rejoice to say - and perhaps more particularly, to be frank about it, where the ground about them was pressed with due emphasis of appeal by the firm wheels of the great winged car. I motored, under invitation and protection, repeatedly back into the sense of the other years, that sense of the "old" and comparatively idle Rome of my particular infatuated prime which I was living to see superseded, and this even when the fond vista bristled with innumerable "signs of the times," unmistakable features of the new era, that, by I scarce know what perverse law, succeeded in ministering to a happy effect. Some of these false notes proceed simply from the immense growth of every sort of facilitation - so that people are much more free than of old to come and go and do, to inquire and explore, to pervade and generally "infest"; with a consequent loss, for the fastidious individual, of his blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of having the occasion and the impression, as he used complacently to say, all to himself. We none of us had anything quite all to ourselves during an afternoon at Ostia, on a beautiful June Sunday; it was a different affair, rather, from the long, the comparatively slow and quite unpeopled drive that I was to remember having last taken early in the autumn thirty years before, and which occupied the day - with the aid of a hamper from once supreme old Spillman, the provider for picnics to a vanished world (since I suspect the antique ideal of "a picnic in the Campagna," the fondest conception of a happy day, has lost generally much of its glamour). Our idyllic afternoon, at any rate, left no chord of sensibility that could possibly have been in question untouched- -not even that of tea on the shore at Fiumincino, after we had spent an hour among the ruins of Ostia and seen our car ferried across the Tiber, almost saffron-coloured here and swirling towards its mouth, on a boat that was little more than a big rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the prodigious weight. What shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the general felicity before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the incident just named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions of the patriarchally primitive and the insolently supersubtle, the earliest and the latest efforts of restless science, were almost immediately to succeed?