a tendency to the brain, and within two days her life was almost despaired of; exactly the same malady as her brother’s.  Also the English nurse was apparently dying at the Storys’ house, and Emma Page, the artist’s youngest daughter, sickened with the same symptoms.  Now you will not wonder that, after the first absorbing flow of sympathy, I fell into a selfish human panic about my child.  Oh, I ‘lost my head,’ said Robert; and if I could have caught him up in my arms and run to the ends of the world, the hooting after me of all Rome could not have stopped me.  I wished—­how I wished!—­for the wings of a dove, or any unclean bird, to fly away with him to be at peace.  But there was no possibility but to stay; also the physicians assured me solemnly that there was no contagion possible, otherwise I would have at least sent him from us to another house.  To pass over this dreary time, I will tell you at once that the three patients recovered; only in poor little Edith’s case Roman fever followed the gastric, and has persisted so, ever since, in periodical recurrence, that she is very pale and thin.  Roman fever is not dangerous to life—­simple fever and ague—­but it is exhausting if not cut off, and the quinine fails sometimes.  For three or four days now she has been free from the symptoms, and we are beginning to hope.  Now you will understand at once what ghastly flakes of death have changed the sense of Rome to me.  The first day by a death-bed!  The first drive out to the cemetery, where poor little Joe is laid close to Shelley’s heart (Cor cordium, says the epitaph), and where the mother insisted on going when she and I went out in the carriage together.  I am horribly weak about such things.  I can’t look on the earth-side of death; I flinch from corpses and graves, and never meet a common funeral without a sort of horror.  When I look deathwards I look over death, and upwards, or I can’t look that way at all.  So that it was a struggle with me to sit upright in that carriage in which the poor stricken mother sate so calmly—­not to drop from the seat, which would have been worse than absurd of me.  Well, all this has blackened Rome to me.  I can’t think about the Caesars in the old strain of thought; the antique words get muddled and blurred with warm dashes of modern, every-day tears and fresh grave-clay.  Rome is spoiled to me—­there’s the truth.  Still, one lives through one’s associations when not too strong, and I have arrived at almost enjoying some things—­the climate, for instance, which, though perilous to the general health, agrees particularly with me, and the sight of the blue sky floating like a sea-tide through the great gaps and rifts of ruins.  We read in the papers of a tremendously cold winter in England and elsewhere, while I am able on most days to walk out as in an English summer, and while we are all forced to take precautions against the sun.  Also Robert is well, and our child has not dropped a single rose-leaf