“My idea is,” said the Senator, “that in Rome”—­we were on our way there—­“we’ll find our work cut out for us.  Think of the objects of interest involved from Romulus and Remus down to the present Pope!”

“I should like my salts before I begin,” said momma, pathetically.

“Over two thousand years,” continued the Senator impressively, “and every year you may be sure has left its architectural imprint.”

“Does Baedeker say that, Senator?” I asked, with a certain severity.

“No, the expression is entirely my own; you may take it down and use it freely.  Two thousand years of remains is what we’ve got before us in Rome, and pretty well scattered too—­nothing like the convenience of Pisa.  I expect we shall have to allow at least four days for it.  That Piazza del Duomo,” continued poppa, thoughtfully, “seems to have been laid out with a view to the American tourist of the future.  But I don’t suppose that kind of forethought is common.”

“How exquisite it was, that cluster of white marble relics of the past on the bosom of dusky Pisa.  It reminded me,” said momma, poetically, “of an old maid’s pearls.”

“I should suggest,” said the Senator to me, “that you make a note of that.  A little sentiment won’t do us any harm—­just a little.  And they are like an old maid’s pearls in connection with that middle-aged, one-horse little city.  Or I should say a widow’s—­Pisa was once a bride of the sea.  A grass widow’s,” improved the Senator.  “It’s all meadow-land round there—­did you notice?”

“I did not,” I said coldly; “but, of course, if I’m to call Pisa a grass widow, it will have to be.  Although I warn you, poppa, that in case of any critic being able to arise and indicate that it is laid out in oyster beds, I shall make it plain that the responsibility is yours.”

We were speeding through Tuscany, and the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards clasped hands and danced along with us.  The sky would have told us we were in Italy if we had come on a magic carpet without a compass or a time-table.  Poppa says we are not, under any circumstances, to mention it more than once, but that we might as well explode the fallacy that there is anything like it in America.  There isn’t.  Our cerulean is very beautifully blue, but in Italy one discovers by contrast that it is an intellectual blue, filled with light, high, provocative.  The sky that bends over Tuscany is the very soul of blue, deep, soft, intense, impenetrable—­the sky that one sees in those little casual bits of landscape behind the shoulders of pre-Raphaelite Saints and Madonnas; and here and there a lake, giving it back with delight, and now and then the long slope of a hill, with an old yellow-walled town creeping up, castle crowned, and raggedly trimmed with olives; and so many ruins that the Senator, summoned by momma to look at the last in view, regarded it with disparagement, which he did not attempt to conceal.  He wondered, he