approved of this corner of her domain. But she suddenly lost her buoyant taste for disembodied spirits, and a rumor floated mistily about that Una had seen the wretched woman who could not forget her woes in death. In 'Monte Beni' this oratory is minutely pictured, where 'beneath the crucifix ... lay a human skull ... carved in gray alabaster, most skillfully done ... with accurate imitation of the teeth, the sutures, the empty eye-caverns.' Everywhere the intense picturesqueness gave material, at Montaüto, for my father's romance."
Amid such surroundings the new romance was sketched out, but not very much progress could have been made with it. In October the family returned to Rome by way of Siena, where some happy days were spent with Story,—a town which impressed Hawthorne almost temperamentally, standing apart in his mind with Perugia. "A thoughtful, shy man," he says, "might settle down here with the view of making the place a home, and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness." At Rome they settled again in the Piazza Poli, and entered on the winter days with much happiness, feeling acquainted now and partly at home in the city. But a misfortune came to them in the illness of Una, who was taken with Roman fever, and her life was despaired of. Hawthorne always took his sorrows hard, and he suffered much in this period of anxiety, enduring in his stoic way the heavy pressure; happily the doctor
