margin of the pool. There were two infants of the Rospigliosi family:
one, a young child playing with a maid and head-servant; another, the
very chubbiest and rosiest boy in the world, sleeping on its nurse's
bosom. The nurse was a comely woman enough, dressed in bright colors,
which fitly set off the deep lines of her Italian face. An old painter
very likely would have beautified and refined the pair into a Madonna,
with the child Jesus; for an artist need not go far in Italy to find a
picture ready composed and tinted, needing little more than to be
literally copied.

Miss M------ had gone away before us; but my wife and I, after leaving
the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and on our way hone, went into the Church of St.
Andrea, which belongs to a convent of Jesuits. I have long ago exhausted
all my capacity of admiration for splendid interiors of churches, but
methinks this little, little temple (it is not more than fifty or sixty
feet across) has a more perfect and gem-like beauty than any other. Its
shape is oval, with an oval dome, and, above that, another little dome,
both of which are magnificently frescoed. Around the base of the larger
dome is wreathed a flight of angels, and the smaller and upper one is
encircled by a garland of cherubs,--cherub and angel all of pure white
marble. The oval centre of the church is walled round with precious and
lustrous marble of a red-veined variety interspersed with columns and
pilasters of white; and there are arches opening through this rich wall,
forming chapels, which the architect seems to have striven hard to make
even more gorgeous than the main body of the church. They contain
beautiful pictures, not dark and faded, but glowing, as if just from the
painter's hands; and the shrines are adorned with whatever is most rare,
and in one of them was the great carbuncle; at any rate, a bright, fiery
gem as big as a turkey's egg. The pavement of the church was one star of
various-colored marble, and in the centre was a mosaic, covering, I