passion of the waters which makes the human heart seem so still. In the
highest spirits we entered Rome, Robert and Penini singing actually--for
the child was radiant and flushed with the continual change of air and
scene. . . . You remember my telling you of our friends the Storys--how
they and their two children helped to make the summer go pleasantly at
the Baths of Lucca. They had taken an apartment for us in Rome, so that
we arrived in comfort to lighted fires and lamps as if coming home,--and
we had a glimpse of their smiling faces that evening. In the morning
before breakfast, little Edith was brought over to us by the manservant
with a message, "the boy was in convulsions--there was danger." We
hurried to the house, of course, leaving Edith with Wilson. Too true!
All that first day we spent beside a death-bed; for the child never
rallied--never opened his eyes in consciousness--and by eight in the
evening he was gone. In the meanwhile, Edith was taken ill at our
house--could not be moved, said the physicians . . . gastric fever,
with a tendency to the brain--and within two days her life was almost
despaired of--exactly the same malady as her brother's. . . . Also the
English nurse was apparently dying at the Story's house, and Emma Page,
the artist's youngest daughter, sickened with the same disease.

'. . . To pass over the dreary time, I will tell you at once that the
three patients recovered--only in poor little Edith's case Roman
fever followed the gastric, and has persisted ever since in periodical
recurrence. She is very pale and thin. Roman fever is not dangerous to
life, but it is exhausting. . . . Now you will understand what ghostly
flakes of death have changed the sense of Rome to me. The first day by
a death-bed, the first drive-out, to the cemetery, where poor little Joe
is laid close to Shelley's heart ("Cor cordium" says the epitaph)
and where the mother insisted on going when she and I went out in the
carriage together--I am horribly weak about such things--I can't look
on the earth-side of death--I flinch from corpses and graves, and never
meet a common funeral without a sort of horror. When I look deathwards
I look _over_ death, and upwards, or I can't look that way at all. So that
it was a struggle with me to sit upright in that carriage in which the
poor stricken mother sat so calmly--not to drop from the seat. Well--all
this has blackened Rome to me. I can't think about the Caesars in the
ol