ells they would
climb lightly about the ruins, and bring me specimens displayed in their
broad, open palms. Our conversation was restricted to few words and many
grunts and gestures, but we understood one another and were on terms of
gay camaraderie. A dozen years afterwards, when there was war between
France and Germany, my sympathies were ardently with the former, and
great were my astonishment and regret at the issue of the conflict. Man
for man, and rightly led and managed, I still believe that Gaul could
wipe up the ground with the Teuton, without half trying. But there were
other forces than those of Moltke and Bismarck fighting against poor
France in that fatal campaign. She was wounded in the house of her
friends.

XVII

Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--
Wholly unlike anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--
Back to the Gods and the Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss
Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I was in a state of some
little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most thorough-going
of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An adventure in
Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and
saturnine genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and
fireworks--The Faun-Enjoying Rome--First impressions--
Lalla's curses.

While my father was conscientiously making acquaintance with the
achievements of old-time art, modern artists were trying to practise
their skill on him; he had already sat to Cephas Giovanni Thompson, and
he was now asked to contribute his head to the studio of a certain Miss
Lander, late of Salem, Massachusetts, now settled, as she intended,
permanently in Rome. "When I dream of home," she told him, "it is
merely of paying a short visit and coming back here before my trunk is
unpacked." Miss Lander was not a painter, but a sculptor, and, in spite
of what my father had said against the nude in sculpture, I think he
liked clay and marble as a vehicle of art better than paint and canvas.
At all events, he consented to give her sittings. He was interested in
the independence of her mode of life, and they got on very comfortably
together; the results of his observation of her appear in the references
to Hilda's and Miriam's unhampered ways of life in The Marble Faun.
She had, as I recall her, a narrow, sallow face, sharp eyes, and a long
chin. She might have been thirty years old. Unlike Miss Harriet Hosmer,
who