ars than he
had hours, all about the churches and palaces and galleries, like a new
Columbus revealing to his astonished audience the wonders of a New
World. And it amused me to see how patiently the older men listened,
sparing his illusions, no doubt because they heard in his ardent,
confident, decidedly dictatorial voice the voice of their own youth
calling. He carried his convictions home with him unspoiled, and his
first building--a hospital or something of the kind--was a monument to
his discoveries, a record of his adventures among the masterpieces of
Europe, beginning on the ground floor as the Strozzi Palace, developing
into various French castles, and finishing on the top as a Swiss
_chalet_, atrocious as architecture, but amusing as autobiography. All
his buildings were more or less reminiscent, and told again in stone the
story so often told in words at the _Nazionale_, for Death was kind and
claimed him before he had ceased to be the discoverer to become himself.

Donoghue too has gone, Donoghue the sculptor who as I knew him in Rome
was so overflowing with life, so young that I felt inclined to credit
him with the gift of immortal youth, so big and handsome and gay that
wherever he went laughter went with him. He too was a discoverer, but
his discovery was of Paris and the Latin Quarter. It had filled a year
between Chicago, where he had been Oscar Wilde's discovery, and Rome,
and he had had time to work off his first fantastic exuberance as
discoverer before I met him. "Donoghue is all right," they would say of
him at the _Nazionale_; "he has got past the brass buttons and pink
swallow tail stage, even if he does cling to low collars and tight pants
and spats."

Certainly, he had got so far as to think he ought to be beginning to
work, and he was in despair because he could not find in Rome a youth as
beautiful as himself to pose for his Young Sophocles. To listen to him
was to believe that Narcissus had come to life again. We would meet him
during our afternoon rambles in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, when
he would stop and take half an hour to assure us he hadn't time to stop,
he was hunting for a model he had just heard of, and then he would drop
into the _Nazionale_ at night to report his want of progress, for no
model ever came up to his standard. He referred to his own beauty with
the frank simplicity and vanity of a child--a real Post-Impressionist;
not one by pose, for there was not a trace