that little room without the memory of the small girl of long ago, and her effort to think Michael Angelo’s “Torso” anything but “chumpy.” Christmas in Rome was made for us as much like our wonderful Christmases at home as was possible in a foreign hotel. It had always been our custom to go to our parents’ room at the pleasant hour of 6 A. M., and generally my mother had induced my long-suffering father to be dressed in some special and marvellous manner at that early hour when we “undid” the bulging, mysterious-looking stockings, and none of these exciting rites were omitted because of our distance from our native land. I think, for that reason, at the end of the beautiful Christmas Day, 1869, the special joy in the hearts of the three little American children was that they had actually forgotten that they were in Rome at all! On January 2, “Teedie” himself writes to his beloved Aunt Annie (Mrs. Gracie) on a piece of note-paper which characteristically has at the top a bird on a bough--that paper being his choice for the writing-desks which had been given to the three children on his birthday: “Will you send the enclosed to Edith Carow. In it I described our ascent of Vesuvius, and so I will describe Pompeii to you.” In a rather cramped hand he enters then into an accurate description of everything connected with Pompeii, gloating with scientific delight over the seventeen skeletons found in the Street of the Tombs, but falling for one moment into a lighter vein, he tells of two little Italian boys whom my father had engaged to come and sing for us the same evening at Sorrento, and whose faces were so dirty that my father and his friend Mr. Stevens washed them with “Kissengin Water.” That extravagance seems to have been specially entertaining to the mind of the young letter-writer. During the year abroad there were lovely times when we were not obliged to think of sculpture or painting--weeks in the great Swiss mountains when, in spite of frequent attacks of his old enemy, my father writes that “Teedie” walked many miles and showed the pluck and perseverance which were so strikingly part of his character. In another letter he is described, while suffering from a peculiarly severe attack of asthma, as being propped up all night in a big chair in the sitting-room, while his devoted mother told him stories of “when she was a little girl” at the old plantation at Roswell; and yet within two days of that very time he is following my father and brother on one of the longest walks they took in the mountains. All through the letters of that period one realizes the developing character of the suffering little boy. My mother writes in a letter to her sister: “Teedie and Ellie have walked to-day thirteen miles, and are very proud of their performance. Indeed Teedie has been further several times.”