1858] FOREIGN LIFE 409
venerable (.-unevari,1 who was doing her portrait, spending afternoons with her in the Medici gardens, in the beautiful Villa Wolkonski, or in the quiet valley near the grove and grotto of Kgeria.
In the mornings we generally walked on the Pincio, and there often noticed a family of father, moth or, and daughter working on the terrace, as the custom then was, at rope-making. One da.y a carriage passed and re-passed with a solitary gentleman in it, who at last, as if he could no longer restrain himself, jumped out and rushed towards the group exclaiming, ""(Test elle ! c/ est elle ! " Then ho became embarrassed, retired, and eventually sent his servant to beg that the mother would bring some of her cord to his house the next morning. She obeyed, and on entering his apartment was struck at once by a portrait on the wall. "That is the picture* of my daughter," she said. tfc No/"1 ho replied, "that is the portrait of my dead wife." Ho then proceeded to say that ho must from that time consider himself allianecd to her daughter, for that in her he seemed to see again his lost wife*, and ho insisted on establishing the old woman and her daughter in comfortable lodgings, and hiring all kinds of masters for the lattor, saying thai he would go away and leave her to her studios, and that in a year he should come back to marry her, which ho did. In Kngland this would be a very extraordinary story, hut it was not thought much of at Homo.
I have always found that the* interests of Rome have a more adhesive power than those* of any other
1 \VJH''I.H<» fuu* portrait of himt4t*if in in th« Utlm at Klcmtnoa.the years old!ends to which nlte devoted httr life brought trunblo tos once instead of three times every day of the year.