The Acropolis book, published privately, cleared for me about $1000. Moreover, difficulties had arisen over the will of my brother, with which none of the parties interested were contented, and so, by a compromise, the family received a part, of which, after the deduction of my drafts from Rome, accepted before his death, there came to me $500. Hence I was, after my straits, at comparative ease for the moment. One of the most generous friends my vagabond past had given me, the late J.M. Forbes of Boston, gave me a commission for a landscape, and I returned to my painting, living in a tent in the Glen of the White Mountains near to the subject chosen. Here I received a visit from Agassiz, and here we had our last meeting and conversation on nature and art. But the long abstention from painting had left me half paralyzed--the hand had always been too far behind the theory. I now began to question if I had any vocation that way, and, with the passing of the summer, I went back to literature and found a place on the old "Scribner's Monthly," now "The Century," under Dr. Holland, the most friendly of chiefs, and there I had as colleague Mr. Gilder, the present editor of the magazine. The greatest mistake, from the business point of view, I have ever made was in leaving the collaboration with Dr. Holland. CHAPTER XXIV ROSSETTI AND HIS FRIENDS Of a life so desultory, fragmentary rather, it is useless to keep the chronology. At no period of it have I been able to direct it with primary reference to pecuniary considerations, nor have I ever succeeded in anything I undertook with primary reference to pecuniary return. My impulses, erratic or otherwise, have always been too strong for a coherent and well subordinated career, and the aimlessness of my early life, favored by the indulgence of my brother and the fondness of my mother, might well account for a life without a practical aim or gain. It is too near its end for regrets or reparation--so that if it ends well it will be well, but it is hardly fitted for systematic record.