As Vesta has lately been
dispossessed there by archaeology (which seems in Rome to enjoy the
plenary powers of our Boards of Health), she may have been given the
Sibyls' Temple at Tivoli in compensation; but all this does not really
matter. What really matters is the mighty chasm which yawns away almost
from your feet, where you sit, and the cataracts, from their brinks,
high or low, plunging into it, and the wavering columns of mist weakly
striving upward out of it: the whole hacked by those mountains Mr. Gray
mentions, with belts of olive orchard on their flanks, and wild paths
furrowing and wrinkling their stern faces. To your right there is a
sheeted cataract falling from the basins of the town laundry, where the
toil of the washers melts into nmsic, and their chatter, like that of
birds, drifts brokenly across the abyss to you. While you sit musing or
murmuring in your rapture, two mandolins and a guitar smilingly intrude,
and after a prelude of Italian airs swing into strains which presently,
through your revery, you recognize as "In the Bowery" and "Just One
Girl," and the smile of the two mandolins and the guitar spreads to a
grin of sympathy, and you are no longer at the Caffe Sibylla in Tivoli,
but in your own Manhattan on some fairy roof-garden, or at some
sixty-cent _table d'hote,_ with wine and music included.
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