best woman that
God ever made."

Few women known to me have had greater grace or ease in the
entertainment of strangers, while in her more private
intercourse, her frank, intelligent, courteous ways won her the
warmest and most desirable friendships.

The position of the Bottas in the literary and artistic world
enabled them to draw together not only the best-known people of
this country, but to a degree greater than any, as far as I
know, the most distinguished visitors from abroad, beyond the
ranks of mere title or fashion. No home, I think, in all the
land compared with theirs in the number and character of its
foreign visitors.

I should like to introduce you to her home as it was--the hall,
with its interesting pictures and fragrant with fresh flowers;
the dining-room, the drawing-rooms, with their magnetized
atmosphere of the past (you can almost feel the presence of
those who have loved to linger there); her own sanctum, where a
chosen few were admitted; but the limits of space forbid. The
queens of Parisian salons have been praised and idealized till
we are led to believe them unapproachable in their social
altitude. But I am not afraid to place beside them an American
woman, uncrowned by extravagant adulation, but fully their
equal--the artist, poet, conversationist, Anne C. L. Botta.

She was absolutely free from egotism or conceit, always avoiding
allusion to what she had accomplished, or her unfulfilled longings.
But she once told me:

Sandy (short for old, red sand stone), I would rather have had
a child than to have made the most perfect statue or the finest
painting ever produced. [She also said]: If I could only stop
longing and aspiring for that which is not in my power to
attain, but is only just near enough to keep me always running
after it, like the donkey that followed an ear of corn which
was tied fast to a stick.

Mrs. Botta came of a Celtic father, gay, humorous, full of impulsive
chivalry and intense Irish patriotism, and of a practical New England
mother, herself of Revolutionary stock, clear of judgment, careful of
the household economy, upright, exemplary, and "facultied." In the
daughter these inherited qualities blended in a most harmonious
whole. Grant Allen, the scientific writer, novelist, and student of
spiritualistic phenomena, t