One of the guests was Madame Guyani, a sister of the hostess. She was a fine conversationalist and interested us much. Only a few months ago she was a sufferer in the terrible earthquake at Ischia. She is still lame as a result of the experiences of that fearful night. She told us all about the earthquake. The night of the disaster she wandered or crept about the fields till morning. The parts of the island which were nothing short of an earthly paradise in the evening were only piles of ruins and dead people in the morning. It was as if Eden had been struck by a thunderbolt, only here there was a happy, unsuspecting people to be suddenly hurled out of existence. _Sunday._--Instead of going to church I stay in Mr. Franklin Simmons’ studio and watch him making a bust of Marion Crawford, the novelist. He has a good subject, for Marion Crawford is a large, handsome man with a fine figure and a genial face. There was a joking dialogue going on as to whether it is the great novelist now sitting to the sculptor Simmons or the great sculptor Simmons doing the face of a novelist, each modestly insisting the other only had claims on immortality. I liked Crawford and his genial ways. I had just finished reading his “Roman Singer.” Frank Simmons seems to me to be the best sculptor in Rome, though he is not yet the most celebrated. He does not seem to try to seek fame; but lets it seek him, which it is doing. Marion Crawford, too, I know, regarded Simmons as the best sculptor living, and some day he will make him the hero of a great novel. Italy is called the land of art and yet curiously there are few great Italian artists. Its galleries sometimes seem to me like opened coffins, where one beholds among the bones the jewel work of some dead age. I feel here much as I felt in Berlin when looking on the golden necklaces of Helen of Troy, dug up by Schliemann. All the fine paintings and marbles here in Rome seem like the ruins, relics of another time. Foreign artists by the hundred, live and work here for the inspiration they get from the fragments of the past. They taste the wine made good with age and mix some of it in the bottles of new wine of their own making. There are more imitators in Rome than anywhere else in the world. * * * * * The duties of the consulate here are nothing compared with Zurich or with any other commercial consulate. The office is often full of callers, but their errands are visits of courtesy or to have passports issued and the like. The trade of Rome with America is insignificant.