Eleven years after "Laura Capello" was written its author visited the scenes where the plot was laid. She enjoyed deeply this foreign travel, and has left a partial record of it in her letters published in Boston and Southern papers, and in her private correspondence. She writes thus to a friend from Rome: "I am living every hour, never have I known days of such enchantment; Roman violets that make the air sweet, Roman fleas that bite with a Swinburne ardor, Roman donkeys that bray in the early morning, Roman shops that bewilder with their gems, shopmen who will make you buy whether you will or no; even in these delights I revel, so what can I say of the pictures, the statues, the ruins of Rome? Do you remember how my Lilian exhausted her raptures after the first layer of her box, and sat afterwards in a mute adoring ecstasy? Think of Lilian's mother in the same position." Several days were spent by her party at a little coast town in France. At times the hours lagged, so the little group, like the young people in the _Decameron_, devised game and story to amuse themselves. Sherwood Bonner showed herself the most fruitful of device, and became the leader in the sport. She devised a game that was played with avidity. The loser each time was supposed to pay the forfeit by taking his life with his own hands. A wan young Scotsman who had been "Ordered South" chanced to be one of the party and participated in the game. For the rest it was a pleasing pastime, but for him it had a tragic suggestion, for at that time Robert Louis Stevenson--it was no less than he--had begun that hand to hand conflict with disease that terminated fatally twenty years later. It is thought that he received from this game the suggestion of that very unusual story of his, "The Suicide Club." Home at last came this busy working bee after her flitting in distant lands. "The Crest of the White Hat," "Rosine's Story," and other sketches show the effect of this foreign travel. The years following were filled with hard work; ever attaining, but never quite satisfied, she strove to make each piece better than the last. During this period she wrote a clever characterization in verse of "The Radical Club," which set all Boston to laughing. Sometimes she had her hours of despondency as when she wrote a friend, "Put up a tablet for me in case I join the mermaids and write on it, Death came to set me free, I met him cheerily As my true friend." During the summer of '78 yellow fever raged in many parts of the South. The citizens of Holly Springs with a noble disregard for consequences offered an asylum to the refugees from the stricken town of Grenada; in this way the plague was introduced, and of the first hundred who took the fever only ten survived.