How do you suppose it felt to be in Seville and to have Don Antonio Sucillio announced and go out with this fascinating Spaniard and partake of breakfast in a summer house lost in orange trees, to have a hidden singer caroling fierce war ballads and passionate love songs and a guitarist do the things with his instrument that only a Spaniard can do? Oh, week of romance and joy stolen from the workaday winter! A never-failing fount of happy memory. Even the beggars, the sturdiest of their breed in all the world, have a charm. Spain! Spain! It has taken the flavor out of everything else. I must go back if only for Madrid, where only one sees Velasquez. At Seville one gains a good idea of Murillo, who was a native of that charming city of roses. The finest specimens are [Illustration: LAURA E. RICHARDS From a photograph by Reynolds] [Illustration: FLORENCE HOWE HALL From a photograph by Langhorne] in the damp dreadful old gallery where the pictures are suffering horribly. There is the divine San Antonio with the child Christ appearing to him, and a very fine Conception. The week in Spain was comparable to nothing but an Arabian Nights’ tale; the dazzle of the Alhambra is still in my eyes! CHAPTER XVIII ARTIST LIFE IN ROME 1894 When we arrived in Italy some of our English and American friends said, “You will find Rome dreadfully changed!” Having known it in the seventies, I welcomed the changes that had brought comfort and health to the modern capital. The old Rome was all there, if you only knew how to look for it! King Umberto, whom I had seen take the oath of office sixteen years before, reigned at the Quirinal with Queen Margherita, and Leo the Thirteenth at the Vatican. Francesco Crispi, the last of the great figures of the _Risorgimento_, was prime minister and ruled Italy with a firm hand, while Cardinal Rampolla, strong and astute, was the Pope’s Secretary of State. Mr. Wayne MacVeagh was American ambassador and Larz Anderson first secretary of embassy. The British Embassy in the old Villa Torlonia close by the Porta Pia was a far more attractive meeting place than the American. We had pleasant relations with both American and English diplomats; of the latter I remember most distinctly Lord Currie, who came to Rome from Constantinople. I had known Lady Currie in London when she was Mrs. Singleton, writing under the pseudonym of Violet Fane. I first met her at a dinner given for my mother by Edmund Yates at the Star and Garter at Richmond. She was gay and handsome then, and I remember her keeping up a brilliant running fire of talk with Louis Jennings and W. H. Mallock. She was graver now, but kept the charm that had made her one of the most sought after women in London.