The Rome of my imagination was as distinctly seven-hilled as a quadruped is four-legged, the Rome I saw had no eminences to speak of anywhere.
Perhaps, as poppa suggested, business had moved away from the hills and we should find them in the suburbs, but this we were obliged to leave unascertained.
Through the warm empty streets we drove and looked at Rome.

It was driving through time, through history, through art, and going backward.
And through the Christian religion, for we started where the pillar of Pius IX., setting forth the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, reaffirmed a modern dogma of the great church across the Tiber; and we rattled on past other and earlier memorials of that church thick-built into the Middle Ages, and of the Early Fathers, and of the very Apostles.

All heaped and crowded and over-built, solid and ragged, decaying and defying decay, clinging to her traditions with both hands, old Rome jostled before us.

Presently uprose a great and crumbling arch and a difference, and as we passed it the sound of the life of the city died indistinctly away and a silence grew up, with the smell of the sun upon grasses and weeds, and we stopped and looked down into Caesar's world, which lay below us, empty.

We gazed in silence for a moment, and then Emmeline remarked that she could make as good a Forum with a box of blocks.
"I shouldn't wonder but what you express the sentiments of all present," said her father admiringly.