While my father was conscientiously making acquaintance with the achievements of old-time art, modern artists were trying to practise their skill on him; he had already sat to Cephas Giovanni Thompson, and he was now asked to contribute his head to the studio of a certain Miss Lander, late of Salem, Massachusetts, now settled, as she intended, permanently in Rome. "When I dream of home," she told him, "it is merely of paying a short visit and coming back here before my trunk is unpacked." Miss Lander was not a painter, but a sculptor, and, in spite of what my father had said against the nude in sculpture, I think he liked clay and marble as a vehicle of art better than paint and canvas. At all events, he consented to give her sittings. He was interested in the independence of her mode of life, and they got on very comfortably together; the results of his observation of her appear in the references to Hilda's and Miriam's unhampered ways of life in The Marble Faun. She had, as I recall her, a narrow, sallow face, sharp eyes, and a long chin. She might have been thirty years old. Unlike Miss Harriet Hosmer, who lived not far away, Miss Lander had no attractiveness for us children. I have reason to think, too, that my father's final opinion of her was not so favorable as his first one. Except photographs, no really good likeness of my father was ever taken; the portrait painted in Washington, in 1862, by Leutze, was the least successful of them all. The best, in my opinion, was an exquisitely wrought miniature of him at the age of thirty, which I kept for a long time, till it was stolen by a friend in London in 1880. Paul Akers, a Maine Yankee, with the twang of his native place still strong in him after ten years in Rome, was another sculptor of our acquaintance; he was very voluble, and escorted us about Rome, and entertained us at his own studio, where he was modelling his best group, "The Drowned Fisher-boy," as he called it. The figure is supposed to be lying at the bottom of the sea, face upward, with a fragment of rock supporting on its sharp ridge the small of the back--a most painful and uncomfortable attitude, suggesting that even in death there could be no rest for the poor youth. Mr. Akers was rather sharply critical of his more famous brother-artists, such as Greenough and Gibson, and was accused by them, apparently not wholly without justification, of yielding too much to the influence of other geniuses in the designing of his groups. But he was a sensible and obliging little personage, and introduced us to the studios of several of his fellow-artists in Rome, some of which were more interesting than his own.