Vines twine round the fruit-trees; black pigs and their families make
their appearance in tribes; the lake of Thrasymene, near which Hannibal
defeated the Romans, spreads itself out before us. The train is going
from Florence to Rome. Towards mid-day a girl enters the carriage,
apparently English or North American, with brown eyes and brown hair,
that curls naturally about her head; she has her guitar-case in her
hand, and flings it up into the net. Her parents follow her. As there
is room in the compartment for forty-eight persons without crowding,
she arranges places for her parents, and after much laughter and joking
the latter settle off to sleep. The Italians stare at her; but not I. I
sit with my back to her. She sits down, back to back with me, then
turns her head and asks me, in Italian, some question about time,
place, or the like. I reply as best I can. She (in English): "You are
Italian?" On my reply, she tells me: "I hardly know twenty words in
Italian; I only speak English, although I have been living in Rome for
two years."
She then went on to relate that she was an American, born of poor
parents out on the Indian frontier; she was twenty-six years old, a
sculptor, and was on her way from Carrara, where she had been
superintending the shipment of one of her works, a statue of Lincoln,
which the Congress at Washington had done her the honour of ordering
from her. It was only when she was almost grown up that her talent had
been discovered by an old sculptor who happened to pay a visit and who,
when he saw her drawing, had, half in jest, given her a lump of clay
and said: "Do a portrait of me!" She had then never seen a statue or a
painting, but she evinced such talent that before long several
distinguished men asked her to do busts of them, amongst others,
Lincoln. She was staying at his house that 14th April, 1865, when he
was murdered, and was consequently selected to execute the monument
after his death. She hesitated for a long time before giving up the
modest, but certain, position she held at the time in a post-office;
but, as others believed in her talent, she came to Europe, stayed first
in Paris, where, to her delight, she made the acquaintance of Gustave
Doré, and where she modelled a really excellent bust of Père Hyacinthe,
visited London, Berlin, Munich, Florence, and settled down in Rome.
There she received plenty of orders, had, moreover, obtained permission
to execute a bust of Cardinal Antonelli, was already much looked up to,
and well-to-do. In a few weeks she was returning to America.
As she found pleasure in talking to me, she exclaimed without more ado:
"I will stay with you," said a few polite things to me, and made me
promise that I would travel with her to Rome from the place where we
were obliged to leave the train, the railway having been broken up to
prevent the Italian troops entering the Papal States. At Treni a Danish
couple got into the train, a mediocre artist and his wife, and with
national astonishment and curiosity watched the evident intimacy
between the young foreigner and myself, concerning which every
Scandinavian in Rome was informed a few days later.
From Monte Rotondo, where the bridge had been blown up, we had to walk
a long distance, over bad roads, and were separated in the throng, but
she kept a place for me by her side. Thus I drove for the first time
over the Roman Campagna, by moonlight, with two brown eyes gazing into
mine. I felt as though I had met one of Sir Walter Scott's heroines,
and won her confidence at our first meeting.