r
demeanor; but Mrs. Jameson said that there was almost always, in
the subject chosen, some allusion to death, instancing the story of
Meleager, an Argonaut, who, I think, slew the Calydonian boar, and
afterwards his two uncles, who had tried to get the boar's hide away
from Meleager's beloved Atalanta; whereupon the young hero was brought
to death by his mother, who in turn killed herself. It is one of the
most thoroughgoing of the classic tragedies, and was a favorite theme
for the sculptors of sarcophagi. Certainly, in the sarcophagi of the
Vatican the bas-reliefs are often scenes of battle, the rush of men and
horses, and the ground strewn with dead; and in others, a dying person
seems to be represented, with his friends weeping along the sides of the
sarcophagus; but often, too, the allusion to death, if it exists at all,
is very remote. The old Romans, like ourselves, had individual ways of
regarding the great change; according to their mood and faith, they were
hopeful or despairing. But death is death, think of it how we will.

I think it was on a previous occasion that I went with my father, afoot,
along this same mighty Appian Way, beside which rise so many rounded
structures, vast as fortresses, containing the remains of the dead of
long ago, and culminating in the huge mass of the Cecilia Metella tomb,
with the mediaeval battlements on its summit. And it was on that walk
that we met the calf of The Marble Faun: "A well-grown calf," my father
says in his notes, "who seemed frolicsome, shy, and sociable all at the
same time; for he capered and leaped to one side, and shook his head, as
I passed him, but soon came galloping behind me, and again started aside
when I looked round." How little I suspected then (or the bull-calf
either, for that matter) that he was to frolic his way into literature,
and go gambolling down the ages to distract the anxious soul of the
lover of Hilda! Another walk of ours was to the huge, green mound of the
Monte Testaccio; it was, at that period, pierced by numerous cavities,
in the dark coolness of which stores of native wines were kept; and
they were sold to customers at the rude wooden tables in front of the
excavations, in flasks shaped like large drops of water, protected with
plaited straw. When, nowadays, in New York or other cities here, I go to
an Italian restaurant, I always call for one of these flasks, and think,
as I drink its contents, of that afternoon with my father. I