r as Piccadilly, and round the lamp
post by Egyptian Hall, up Bond Street again, and in at the window. "Hold
on," said Sinnett, and "I never held on to anything as tight in my life
as I did to that table," said Forepaugh in conclusion.

He always reminded me of the man who so annoyed my Uncle, Charles
Godfrey Leland, by always knowing, doing, or having everything better or
bigger than anybody else. "Why, if I were to tell him I had an elephant
in my back yard," my Uncle used to say, "he would at once invite me to
see the mastodon in his." Forepaugh had a mastodon up his sleeve for
everybody else's elephant.

V

[Illustration: By Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Company
ELIHU VEDDER]

If Forepaugh gave us a great deal of information we had no possible use
for and talked us to despair, he was really a good fellow whom we should
have missed from our table. And it was through him J. and I were first
made welcome in that one house open to us, to which I have been all this
time in coming. For it was Forepaugh who told Vedder we were in Rome,
and Vedder, once he knew it, would not hear of our shutting his door
in our own faces, nor would Mrs. Vedder, whatever the condition of our
wardrobe.

Vedder may have revealed many things in his recent _Digressions_, but
not the extent of the hospitality he and his wife showed to the American
who was a stranger in Rome, where, even then, they had been long at
home. Mrs. Vedder carried her amiability to the point of climbing our
six flights of stairs and calling on me in the rooms that suited us
admirably for our work but were less adapted to afternoon receptions,
and she would have gone further and shown me how to adapt them by moving
every bit of furniture from where it was and arranging it all over
again. Not the least part of her friendliness was not to mind when I did
not fall in with her plans, as I couldn't, since so long as the sun
shone in at the windows all was right with the rooms as far as I could
see. I was in the absurd stage of industry when I did not care where my
Roman furniture stood so long as my Roman tasks got done. Even our
_padrona_ told me her surprise that, foreigner as I was, I seemed to do
as much work as she did, which I accepted as a compliment. After that
first attempt Mrs. Vedder did not return to climb our six flights, but
she would not let us off from climbing her four or five.

Often as we took advantage of their hospitality, we never found the
Vedde