ur own country should not be accompanied by the priestly robe and
manner which for her marred the humanity of the Christian Brotherhood of
Paris.

The establishment of the Protestant Deaconesses is praised by Margaret.
She visited also the School for Idiots, near Paris, where her feelings
vented themselves in "a shower of sweet and bitter tears; of joy at what
has been done, of grief for all that I and others possess, and cannot
impart to these little ones." She was much impressed with the character
of the master of the school, a man of seven or eight and twenty years,
whose fine countenance she saw "looking in love on those distorted and
opaque vases of humanity."

Turning her face southward, she thus takes leave of the great capital:--

"Paris! I was sad to leave thee, thou wonderful focus, where ignorance
ceases to be a pain, because there we find such means daily to lessen
it."

Railroads were few in the France of forty years ago. Margaret came by
diligence and boat to Lyons, to Avignon, where she waded through the
snow to visit the tomb of Laura, and to Marseilles, where she embarked
for Genoa. Her first sight of this city did not disappoint her, but to
her surprise, she found the weather cold and ungenial:--

"I could not realize that I had actually touched those shores to which I
had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would
expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight. Seen by a cutting
wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view,
failed to charm." Both here and in Leghorn Margaret visited Italians at
their houses, and found them very attractive, "charming women, refined
and eloquent men." The Mediterranean voyage was extended as far as
Naples, which she characterizes as "priest-ridden, misgoverned, full of
dirty, degraded men and women, yet still most lovely." And here, after a
week which appeared to be "an exact copy of the miseries of a
New-England spring," with a wind "villanous, horrible, exactly like the
worst east wind of Boston," Margaret found at last her own Italy, and
found it "beautiful, worthy to be loved and embraced, not talked
about.... Baiae had still a hid divinity for me, Vesuvius a fresh baptism
of fire, and Sorrento--oh! Sorrento was beyond picture, beyond poesy."

After Naples came Margaret's first view of Rome, where she probably
arrived early in May, and where she remained until late in the month of
June. We do not find among her let