aughter, sickened with the same symptoms. Now you will not
wonder that, after the first absorbing flow of sympathy, I fell into a
selfish human panic about my child. Oh, I 'lost my head,' said Robert;
and if I _could_ have caught him up in my arms and run to the ends of
the world, the hooting after me of all Rome could not have stopped me. I
wished--how I wished!--for the wings of a dove, or any unclean bird, to
fly away with him to be at peace. But there was no possibility but to
stay; also the physicians assured me solemnly that there was no
contagion possible, otherwise I would have at least sent him from us to
another house. To pass over this dreary time, I will tell you at once
that the three patients recovered; only in poor little Edith's case
Roman fever followed the gastric, and has persisted so, ever since, in
periodical recurrence, that she is very pale and thin. Roman fever is
not dangerous to life--simple fever and ague--but it is exhausting if
not cut off, and the quinine fails sometimes. For three or four days now
she has been free from the symptoms, and we are beginning to hope. Now
you will understand at once what ghastly flakes of death have changed
the sense of Rome to me. The first day by a death-bed! The first drive
out to the cemetery, where poor little Joe is laid close to Shelley's
heart (_Cor cordium_, says the epitaph), and where the mother insisted
on going when she and I went out in the carriage together. I am horribly
weak about such things. I can't look on the earth-side of death; I
flinch from corpses and graves, and never meet a common funeral without
a sort of horror. When I look deathwards I look _over_ death, and
upwards, or I can't look that way at all. So that it was a struggle
with me to sit upright in that carriage in which the poor stricken
mother sate so calmly--not to drop from the seat, which would have been
worse than absurd of me. Well, all this has blackened Rome to me. I
can't think about the Caesars in the old strain of thought; the antique
words get muddled and blurred with warm dashes of modern, every-day
tears and fresh grave-clay. Rome is spoiled to me--there's the truth.
Still, one lives through one's associations when not too strong, and I
have arrived at almost enjoying some things--the climate, for instance,
which, though perilous to the general health, agrees particularly with
me, and the sight of the blue sky floating like a sea-tide through the
great gaps and rifts