lived not far away, Miss Lander had no attractiveness for us
children. I have reason to think, too, that my father's final opinion of
her was not so favorable as his first one. Except photographs, no really
good likeness of my father was ever taken; the portrait painted in
Washington, in 1862, by Leutze, was the least successful of them all.
The best, in my opinion, was an exquisitely wrought miniature of him at
the age of thirty, which I kept for a long time, till it was stolen by a
friend in London in 1880.

Paul Akers, a Maine Yankee, with the twang of his native place still
strong in him after ten years in Rome, was another sculptor of our
acquaintance; he was very voluble, and escorted us about Rome, and
entertained us at his own studio, where he was modelling his best group,
"The Drowned Fisher-boy," as he called it. The figure is supposed to
be lying at the bottom of the sea, face upward, with a fragment of rock
supporting on its sharp ridge the small of the back--a most painful and
uncomfortable attitude, suggesting that even in death there could be no
rest for the poor youth. Mr. Akers was rather sharply critical of his
more famous brother-artists, such as Greenough and Gibson, and was
accused by them, apparently not wholly without justification, of
yielding too much to the influence of other geniuses in the designing
of his groups. But he was a sensible and obliging little personage, and
introduced us to the studios of several of his fellow-artists in Rome,
some of which were more interesting than his own.

Bright little Miss Harriet Hosmer, with her hands in her jacket-pockets,
and her short hair curling up round her velvet cap, struts cheerfully
forth out of the obscurity of the past in my memory; her studio, I
think, adjoined that of Gibson, of whom I remember nothing whatever. Her
most notable production at that time was a Puck sitting on a toadstool,
with a conical shell of the limpet species by way of a cap; he
somehow resembled his animated and clever creator. Miss Hosmer's face,
expressions, gestures, dress, and her manifestations in general were
perfectly in keeping with one another; there never was a more succinct
and distinct individuality; she was wholly unlike anybody else, without
being in the least unnatural or affected. Her social manner was of a
persistent jollity; but no doubt she had her grave moments or hours, a
good and strong brain, and a susceptibility to tragic conceptions, as is
shown