One night at a dinner party he was relating the incident of a Union soldier who had donned a gray uniform once and entered the Rebel army at Atlanta. He had read a description of this soldier’s experiences and hairbreadth escapes in the Atlantic Monthly, and had been extraordinarily impressed. The soldier’s name, as he remembered it, was the same as my own. Could we be related? I astonished him by saying that I was more than related, that I was the soldier myself, and the article in the Atlantic was my own. Mr. Astor grasped my hand, saying he had thought of that soldier’s action a hundred times. My narrative had made Mr. Astor a friend. He rarely introduced me to a friend after that without adding: “He is the man who went into Atlanta.” The palace where Mr. Astor lives is the same that our Minister Marsh occupied when I was here some years ago. It is built on the ruins of the Baths of Constantine. I have looked everywhere trying to find the “hills” of Rome, but almost in vain. They can barely be located, and are not half as defined as the hills of Boston. * * * * * Yesterday I went to look at the apartment where the consulate used to be by the Spanish stairway. The consul’s little back room is where the Poet Keats died. I could think I saw him lying there waiting for beautiful death to come, and I seemed to hear him say to his friend Severn: “I already feel the flowers growing over me.” And I saw Severn too, forgetting his easel, to sweep and cook and wait and watch all the nights alone, till the beautiful soul of Keats should take its flight. The room is a poorly lighted common little bedroom where the poet died, but it will be visited many a day in memory of one who lived, not between brick walls, but in high imaginations. We also went to the poet’s simple grave, as we had often done before, and looked at the green sod above one who Had loved her with a love that was his doom. It was the love for Fannie Brawn and not the bitter pens of the Quarterlies, that killed John Keats after all. Severn found that out only six short years ago, when the love letters from Keats to Fannie Brawn were placed in the now old man’s hands. _December 28._--Spite of bad weather we are having some wonderful sunsets lately, and strangers in Rome linger long on the Spanish stairway to enjoy a scene they have so often heard of--a sunset by the Tiber. Last night Madame Bompiani invited us to tea with her. She lives at the Hilda’s tower palace, celebrated by Hawthorne, in the “Marble Faun.” Her husband is a well-known Roman lawyer, and she herself writes interesting letters to the Chicago _Interior_. We learned much about things in Rome direct from him, and after the supper we were taken up to the tower.