your namesake of old; especially as you have almost
avowed yourself of their religion, by undertaking to keep the lamp
alight before the Virgin's shrine."

"No, no, Miriam!" said Hilda, who had come joyfully forward to greet
her friend. "You must not call me a Catholic. A Christian girl--even
a daughter of the Puritans--may surely pay honor to the idea of divine
Womanhood, without giving up the faith of her forefathers. But how kind
you are to climb into my dove-cote!"

"It is no trifling proof of friendship, indeed," answered Miriam; "I
should think there were three hundred stairs at least."

"But it will do you good," continued Hilda. "A height of some fifty feet
above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get
from fifty miles of distance. The air so exhilarates my spirits, that
sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my
tower, in the faith that I should float upward."

"O, pray don't try it!" said Miriam, laughing; "If it should turn out
that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman
pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never
come down among us again."

This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which
it is possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome. She dwelt in her
tower, as free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city
beneath, as one of her companion doves to fly downward into the
street;--all alone, perfectly independent, under her own sole
guardianship, unless watched over by the Virgin, whose shrine she
tended; doing what she liked without a suspicion or a shadow upon the
snowy whiteness of her fame. The customs of artist life bestow such
liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere restricted within so much
narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication that, whenever we admit
women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions, we must also remove
the shackles of our present conventional rules, which would then become
an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife. The system seems to
work unexceptionably in Rome; and in many other cases, as in Hilda's,
purity of heart and life are allowed to assert themselves, and to be
their own proof and security, to a degree unknown in the society of
other cities.

Hilda, in her native land, had early shown what was pronounced by
connoisseurs a decided genius for the pictorial art. Even in her
schooldays--still not so very dista