'. . . To pass over the dreary time, I will tell you at once that the three patients recovered--only in poor little Edith's case Roman fever followed the gastric, and has persisted ever since in periodical recurrence. She is very pale and thin. Roman fever is not dangerous to life, but it is exhausting. . . . Now you will understand what ghostly flakes of death have changed the sense of Rome to me. The first day by a death-bed, the first drive-out, to the cemetery, where poor little Joe is laid close to Shelley's heart ("Cor cordium" says the epitaph) and where the mother insisted on going when she and I went out in the carriage together--I am horribly weak about such things--I can't look on the earth-side of death--I flinch from corpses and graves, and never meet a common funeral without a sort of horror. When I look deathwards I look _over_ death, and upwards, or I can't look that way at all. So that it was a struggle with me to sit upright in that carriage in which the poor stricken mother sat so calmly--not to drop from the seat. Well--all this has blackened Rome to me. I can't think about the Caesars in the old strain of thought--the antique words get muddled and blurred with warm dashes of modern, everyday tears and fresh grave-clay. Rome is spoilt to me--there's the truth. Still, one lives through one's associations when not too strong, and I have arrived at almost enjoying some things--the climate, for instance, which, though pernicious to the general health, agrees particularly with me, and the sight of the blue sky floating like a sea-tide through the great gaps and rifts of ruins. . . . We are very comfortably settled in rooms turned to the sun, and do work and play by turns, having almost too many visitors, hear excellent music at Mrs. Sartoris's (A. K.) once or twice a week, and have Fanny Kemble to come and talk to us with the doors shut, we three together. This is pleasant. I like her decidedly. 'If anybody wants small talk by handfuls, of glittering dust swept out of salons, here's Mr. Thackeray besides! . . .' Rome: March 29.