artist of Paris, and among other interesting people were Miss
Elise Emmons of Leamington, England, a grand-niece of Charlotte Cushman.
M. Carolus Duran was very magnificent, his breast covered with jewelled
orders and decorations from the various societies, academies, and
governments that have honored him. He is a short man and has grown quite
stout, but he carries himself with inimitable grace and dignity, and in
his luminous eyes one still surprises that far-away look which Sargent
so wonderfully caught in his portrait of the great French artist,
painted in his earlier life.

The number of spacious salons with their easy-chairs and sofas enabled
all guests who desired to ensconce themselves luxuriously to do so, and
watch the glittering scene. The supper room and the salon for dancing
were not more alluring than the salons wherein one could study this
brilliant throng of diplomates, titled nobility, distinguished artists,
social celebrities, and those who were, in various ways, each _persona
grata_ in Rome. Among those at this particular festivity were the
American novelist, Frank Hamilton Spearman, with Mrs. Spearman. In late
American fiction Mr. Spearman has made for himself a distinctive place
as the novelist whose artistic eye has discerned the romance in the new
phases of life created by the extensive systems of mountain railroading,
and the great irrigation schemes of the far West, which have not only
opened up new territory, but have called into evidence new combinations
of the qualities most potent in human life,--love, sacrifice, heroism,
devotion to duty, and tragedy and comedy as well. In his novels, "The
Daughter of a Magnate" and "Whispering Smith," in such vivid and
delightful short stories as "The Ghost at Point of Rocks," which
appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_ for August of 1907, Mr. Spearman has
dramatized the pathos, the wit, the vast and marvellous spirit of
enterprise, the desolation of isolated regions, the all-pervading
potency and one may almost say intimacy of modern life made possible by
the Arabian Nights' dream of wireless telegraphy, "soaring" cars,
long-distance telephoning, and lightning express train service in cars
that climb the mountains beyond the clouds, or dash through tunnels with
ten thousand feet of mountains above them. Mr. Spearman is the novelist
_par excellence_ of this intense _vie modernite_.

On Washington's Birthday, again, the stately salons of the American
Embassy i