orks of art; he looked even upon the Venus of Milo with
coldness. "It seemed," wrote he, speaking of the weather one morning,
"as if a cold, bitter, sullen agony were interposed between each
separate atom of our bodies. In all my experience of bad atmospheres,
methinks I never knew anything so atrocious as this. England has nothing
to compare with it." The "grip" was a disease unnamed at that epoch,
but I should suppose that it was very vividly described in the above
sentence. He had the grip, and for nearly six months he saw everything
through its medium.

Besides the Venus and the populace, we saw various particular persons. I
went with my father to the bank, and saw a clerk give him a long roll
of bright gold coins, done up in blue paper; and we visited, or were
visited by, a Miss MacDaniel and her mother, two Salem women, "of plain,
New England manners and appearance," wrote my father, "and they have
been living here for nearly two years. The daughter was formerly at
Brook Farm. The mother suffered so much from seasickness on the passage
that she is afraid to return to America, and so the daughter is kept
here against her will, and without enjoyment, and, as I judge, in narrow
circumstances. It is a singular misfortune. She told me that she had
been to the Louvre but twice since her arrival, and did not know Paris
at all." This looks like a good theme for Mr. Henry James.

We called on the American minister to Paris, Judge John Young Mason,
a simple and amiable personage. He was rubicund and stolid, and talked
like a man with a grievance; but, as my father afterwards remarked, it
was really Uncle Sam who was the aggrieved party, in being mulcted
of seventeen thousand dollars a year in order that the good old
judge should sleep after dinner in a French armchair. The judge was
anticipating being superseded in his post, but, as it turned out, was
not driven to seek second-rate employment to support himself in his old
age; he had the happiness to die in Paris the very next year.

But the most agreeable of our meetings was with Miss Maria Mitchell, the
astronomer, who, like ourselves, was stopping a few days in Paris on her
way to Rome. She desired the protection of our company on the journey,
though, as my father remarked, she looked well able to take care of
herself. She was at this time about forty years old; born in Nantucket;
the plainest, simplest, heartiest of women, with a face browned by the
sun, of which she