She still wrote occasionally and was always an omnivorous reader. She often read books for her busy husband. _A propos_ of this, she told me a story of their Constantinople days. Lord Currie had given her a life of the Sultan, recently published in England. Was it interesting? he asked her one day. “Yes,” she said, “but”--and got no further, “people of importance” interrupting. They dined that night with the Sultan; during the dinner the conversation flagging, Lord Currie had a happy inspiration. “Sire,” he said, “an interesting book has just appeared about yourself!” Lady Currie made a frantic effort to reach his foot under the table. “Ah!” said the Sultan. “I should like to see that book!” “You shall have my copy!” exclaimed the Ambassador. The Sultan’s parting words were, “I will send for the book in the morning.” When they were in the carriage Lady Currie said to her husband: “The book you recommended to the Sultan opens with this sentence, ‘A more loathsome toad than the Sultan Abdul Hamid I never saw!’” When the Sultan’s servant called next day, the volume was not to be found. It was sent for more than once, and the next time the Ambassador had an audience, the Sultan reproached him with duplicity. Rome in the last decade of the nineteenth century was as fascinating to me as it had been to my mother in 1843, when she came here on her wedding journey. My aunt still held her little court at Palazzo Odescalchi where I met many of the elder artists. Mr. Richard Greenough, the sculptor, rarely failed to appear on her reception days; he was an exquisite man with the old fashioned “hair-trigger breeding” of a Boston gentleman of the early Victorian age. Mr. William Story was at work upon his last statue, the “Genius of Grief”, a kneeling figure of an angel, for his wife’s grave in the Protestant cemetery, of which Shelley wrote, “It might make one in love with death to think one should be buried in so sweet a place.”