“The professors and schoolmasters are having the roughest time of all,” he declared. “The devil and the lawyers look after their own. The _avvocatos_ and the _medicos_ all over Italy have organized to help their fellows--but these poor teachers!” He had just ferreted out a new professor and family. “They receive one franc and a half a day from the general committee--that keeps the breath of life in ’em--but the father, the only one capable of earning a _soldo_, has to stand in line and wait for hours every day to draw the money. If you could have seen their room! I spent those two hundred francs on chairs, beds and blankets. ‘Who gives promptly, gives twice,’ Mr. Parrish says. Isn’t he a corker? Don’t let ’em get discouraged--that’s his argument; it’s the delay that breaks their hearts. Those who have the stuff left in them ought to be kept hard at work, nose to the grindstone.” Mrs. Griscom’s Ladies’ Auxiliary was the best committee I ever served on because it had the least red tape. Like the old vigilantes of the West, it was created for an urgent need, lived a short life with the maximum of work, the minimum of talk. My colleagues, Mesdames Samuel Abbott, Winthrop Chanler, and Nelson Gay, worked each according to their lights, meeting with the Ambassadress from time to time to compare notes and vote supplies. The work was quietly done, with little fuss or feathers. Every _soldo_ was well spent, and passed direct from the treasury to the sufferer. Jane Sedgwick and Luella Serrao were my right and left hand (Luella is the widow of our dear Teodoro, for years the lawyer of the Embassy, always the friend of the Americans in Rome), Patsy was my flying Mercury, Elinor Diederich took the Q.’s and other _profughi_ under her wing. Luella had a patriarchal family from Bagnara in her care, an old man and woman with a screed of children and grandchildren. She had been telling me about them one afternoon as we were walking together; just as we turned out of the Piazza Venezia, into the Via Nazionale, a clear voice hailed us: “_Mia grande Signora!_” Luella, delicate as a windflower, paused. A great gaunt woman, wearing a black kerchief over her head and a quaint short skirt, stood before us. She touched her fingers to her lips; then with the graceful Oriental gesture stooped and touched the hem of the “grande Signora’s” garment, and passed on. “That was Sora Clara from Bagnara,” Luella explained. “She was discharged from the hospital yesterday.” We were now passing the fine old palace of the Preffetura. “How well I remember coming to see you there!” I said, looking at the stern façade, “when the Prefect had that stroke of apoplexy. It was said the nursing of his American daughter-in-law saved his life.”