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this was the subject of the letter which I was to compose. I brought everything I had to bear upon that letter and when I was through I found the table full. "Read," they said breathlessly. I complied with a rendition crossed out: dripping ^well saturated with deep and noble sentiments which bought convulsive sobs from all the women at the table and even caused by own eyes to mist over. I have often wondered what the reaction of Maria Pia might have been to her mother's letter, written in the dining room of the Giulio Cesare.

  Finally the celestial blue of the summer

ocean crossed out: could be ^was bordered by the cobalt of foreign shores, and from the veiled distance emerged Vesuvius. crossed out: familiar to all the world

   I recognized those ancient outlines from

their souvenirs, scattered over America: amateur aquarelles on the walls of ^provincial bedrooms amateur oils in the closed parlors of New England farmhouses, tokens of journeys back to old