This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ...sculpture in the Vatican--the entrance which is behind St. Peter's and so far from the rest of the Vatican buildings. There is no entrance fee, but sight-seers have always to present an order, obtained beforehand, to the officials at the gate, and these officials are very apt to make themselves disagreeable to strangers, particularly to ladies. One very wet day I had gone to the Vatican alone: Louisa was not very fond of sight-seeing, and she had considered it too cold and damp to allow the girls to come either. As to the boys, well they were boys, and boys have not generally a taste for anything so abstract as statuary. I think they had gone to see some small review or march-past of soldiers at the Coliseum or the Quirinal. It was a wretched day: the rain was falling in torrents and churning up the dust of the streets into seas of liquid-white mud. It was very cold too, and 'the damp seemed to penetrate one's bones in a way it never does at home. " I had ' just got into the entrance, and was shaking the wet from my coat, when I perceived one of the officials in the act of shutting the gate in the face of a lady who wanted to come in. I saw the poor woman trying to poke her order through the bars, and I could hear her voice raised entreatingly as she supplicated the obdurate official; and indeed she was in awretched plight, for a high wind was driving the rain in sheets about her, and what with struggling with her bag, her flapping waterproof, and her order, it was impossible for her to re-open her umbrella. I had been long enough in Rome to know the tricks of these men who guard the public buildings, and I knew that if the poor lady would put her hand in her pocket and pull out half a franc, she would, order or no...