She is, I have been told, very well received in society abroad, and when baptized a Catholic in Rome, two ladies of high position, Countess Cholmondeley and Princess Wittgenstein, offered to stand godmother for her.  Edmonia chose Lady Cholmondeley, whom I remember well in Rome as a great belle and a highly accomplished woman.  She wrote poetry, I was told, and modelled in clay with much taste, and her finely trained voice and dainty playing of the harp I well remember as one of the attractions of Miss Cushman’s receptions.

Edmonia has, beside her somewhat hard English appellation, two pretty baptismal names—­Maria Ignatia.

CHAPTER X.

Cataloguing the Library—­A Thousand Volumes—­Contrasting Books—­Some Rare Volumes—­Mr. Greeley’s Collection of Paintings—­Authenticity of the Cenci Questioned—­A Portrait of Galileo—­Portrait of Martin Luther—­Portrait of Greeley at Thirty—­Powers’ Proserpine—­Hart’s Bust of Mr. Greeley—­Mosaics and Medallions.

July 2.

This morning we have had a family picnic at the side-hill house, where the amusement was, however, neither “Twenty Questions,” gossip, nor croquet; but arranging and cataloguing uncle’s large library.  The books had hitherto been kept in the house in the woods, with the exception of those in daily use, filling three good-sized bookcases in our present residence; but as the house in the woods had been twice broken into last winter, Ida thought it safer to move them all down this summer to the side-hill house, where Bernard sleeps.  Accordingly, a wagon-load or two was brought down the other day and deposited in the dining-room, and this morning, as we had no guests, and no very pressing occupations, we all, including Minna, went up there directly after breakfast to look them over.

“I am resolved,” Ida had said, “to have the books catalogued, that I may know in future how many I yearly lose by lending them to my friends.”  Consequently the work was doubled by the necessity of writing down the names, and we had unluckily chosen the hottest day that we had so far experienced for this laborious task.  We all went to work, however, with as much energy as though the temperature was at a reasonable degree, and I felt quite proud of my achievements when the work was done, having catalogued, myself, over three hundred volumes.

Our work was divided:  mamma read off the names of the books, and Marguerite and I wrote them down, and Minna then dusted and carried them into the next room to Ida, who placed them upon the shelves, dividing the library into compartments for poetry, biography, science, fiction, etc.  An endless task it seemed at first to sort the books, for more than one thousand volumes of all sizes and in every variety of binding from cloth to calf, had been thrown promiscuously on the floor, and the hottest antagonists in the political and religious world were now lying side by side in