'. . . Well, we are all well to begin with--and have been well--our troubles came to us through sympathy entirely. A most exquisite journey of eight days we had from Florence to Rome, seeing the great monastery and triple church of Assisi and the wonderful Terni by the way--that passion of the waters which makes the human heart seem so still. In the highest spirits we entered Rome, Robert and Penini singing actually--for the child was radiant and flushed with the continual change of air and scene. . . . You remember my telling you of our friends the Storys--how they and their two children helped to make the summer go pleasantly at the Baths of Lucca. They had taken an apartment for us in Rome, so that we arrived in comfort to lighted fires and lamps as if coming home,--and we had a glimpse of their smiling faces that evening. In the morning before breakfast, little Edith was brought over to us by the manservant with a message, "the boy was in convulsions--there was danger." We hurried to the house, of course, leaving Edith with Wilson. Too true! All that first day we spent beside a death-bed; for the child never rallied--never opened his eyes in consciousness--and by eight in the evening he was gone. In the meanwhile, Edith was taken ill at our house--could not be moved, said the physicians . . . gastric fever, with a tendency to the brain--and within two days her life was almost despaired of--exactly the same malady as her brother's. . . . Also the English nurse was apparently dying at the Story's house, and Emma Page, the artist's youngest daughter, sickened with the same disease.