improvement."

One evening we visited Miss Bremer, the novelist, of Sweden, who was
then near the end of her foreign travels, which had begun with her visit
to America in 1849. She had met my father in Lenox, and had written of
him in the book of her travels. She was a small woman, with a big heart
and broad mind, packed full of sense, sentiment, and philanthropy. She
had an immense nose, designed, evidently, for some much larger person;
her conversation in English, though probably correct, was so oddly
accented that it was difficult to follow her. She was a very lovable
little creature, then nearing her sixtieth year. Most of her voluminous
literary work was done. Her house in Rome was near the Capitol and the
Tarpeian Rock; and after we had forgathered with her there for a
while, she accompanied us forth--the moon being up--to see the famous
precipice. It was to this incident that we owe the scene in The Marble
Faun, the most visibly tragic in my father's writings. "The court-yard,"
he writes in his notes, "is bordered by a parapet, leaning over which
we saw a sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a
four-story house; not that the precipice was a bare face of rock, but
it appeared to be cased in some sort of cement, or ancient stone-work,
through which the primeval rock, here and there, looked grimly and
doubtfully. Bright as the Roman moonlight was, it would not show the
front of the wall, or rock, so well as I should have liked to see it,
but left it pretty much in the same degree of dubiety and half-knowledge
in which the antiquarians leave most of the Roman ruins. Perhaps this
precipice may have been the Traitor's Leap; perhaps it was the one on
which Miss Bremer's garden verges; perhaps neither of the two. At any
rate, it was a good idea of the stern old Romans to fling political
criminals down from the very height of the Capitoline Hill on which
stood the temples and public edifices, symbols of the institutions
which they sought to violate." But there was no tragic suggestion in
our little party, conducted about by the prattling, simple, affectionate
little woman, so homely, tender, and charitable. "At parting," wrote
my father, "she kissed my wife most affectionately on each cheek,
'because,' she said, 'you look so sweetly'; and then she turned towards
myself. I was in a state of some little tremor, not knowing what might
be about to befall me, but she merely pressed my hand, and we parted,
p