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In planning a visit to a Casa dei Bambini, you can be sure of only one thing, not, however, an inconsiderable thing, and that is that all the children will be happily absorbed in some profitable undertaking. It never fails. There are no “blue Mondays.” Rain or shine outdoors, inside the big room there always blows across the heart of the visitor a fine, tonic breath of free, and hence, never listless life. On days in winter when the sirocco blows, the debilitating wind from Africa, which reduces the whole population of Rome to inert and melancholy passivity, the children in the Casa are perhaps not quite so briskly energetic as usual in their self-imposed task of teaching and governing themselves, but they are by far the most briskly energetic Romans in the city.

It is all so interesting to them, they cannot stop to be bored or naughty. Just as one of our keen, hungry-minded Yankee school-teachers, turned loose for the first time in an historic European city, throws herself with such fervor into the exploration of all its fascinating and informing sights that she is astonished to hear later that it was one of the hottest and most trying summers ever known, so these equally hungry-minded, healthy children fling themselves upon the fascinating and informing wonders of the world about them with such ardor that they are always astonished when the long, happy day is done.