We arrived in Rome on the 17th of January, 1858, at eleven o'clock at night. After a day or two at Spillman's Hotel, we moved into lodgings in the Via Porta Pinciana, the Palazzo Larazani. The street extended just below the ridge of the Pincian Hill, and was not far from the broad flight of steps mounting upward from the Piazza d' Espagna, on the left as you go up. In spite of its resounding name, our new dwelling had not a palatial aspect. It was of no commanding height or architectural pretensions; a stuccoed edifice, attached on both sides to other edifices. The street, like other Roman streets, was narrow; it was dirty like them, and, like them, was paved with cobble-stones. The place had been secured for us by (I think) our friends the Thompsons; Mr. Thompson--the same man who had painted my father's portrait in 1853--had a studio hard by. The Thompsons had been living in Rome for five years or more, and knew the Roman ropes. They were very comfortable people to know; indeed, Rome to me would have been a very different and less delightful place without them, as will hereafter appear. The family consisted of Cephas Giovanni Thompson, the father and artist; his wife and his two sons and one daughter. "Cephas Giovanni," being interpreted, means plain Peter John; and it was said (though, I believe, unjustifiably) that Peter John had been the names originally given to Thompson by his parents at the baptismal-font, but that his wife, who was a notable little woman, a sister of Anna Cora Mowatt, the actress, well known in America and England seventy years ago, had persuaded him to translate them into Greek and Italian, as more suitable to the romantic career of an artist of the beautiful. I fancy the story arose from the fact that Mrs. Thompson was a woman who, it was felt, might imaginably conceive so ambitious a project. She was small, active, entertaining, clever, and "spunky," as the New-Englanders would have said; indeed, she had a rousing temper, on occasion. Her husband, on the other hand, had the mildest, wisely smiling, philosophic air, with a low, slow voice, and a beard of patriarchal fashion and size, though as yet it was a rich brown, with scarcely a thread of silver in it. Brown and abundant, also, was his hair; he had steady, bright, brown eyes, and was rather under the average height of Anglo-Saxon man. But for all this mild-shining aspect of his, his dark eyebrows were sharply arched, or gabled rather; and my mother, who had absorbed from her former friend, George Combe, a faith in the betrayals of phrenology, expressed her private persuasion that good Mr. Thompson had a temper, too. She and George Combe turned out to be right in this instance, though I am not going to tell the tale of how we happened to be made acquainted with the fact. Little thunder-storms once in a while occur in human skies as well as in the meteorological ones; and the atmosphere is afterwards all the sweeter and softer.