RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
music just as much as anybody, but that he did want to get something more out of European travel than a nightly opera and a daily symphony.
So--we went to Italy and saw Rome and Florence in true Baedecker style. When we arrived in Rome we opened our Baedecker and read that there was almost no foundation for Rome’s awful reputation as an unhealthy place. “Rome is a very healthy place,” said Baedecker, “at all times of the year except the first two weeks in August, when a visit there is attended with risk.” We had arrived for the first two weeks in August!
When we came home from our wedding trip we found that our house was not yet completed, so we went to stay with Judge and Mrs. Taft for a month at the old house in Mt. Auburn. It was a nice old place, with about three acres of ground, but the air around it was just about as sooty as if it had been located down under the factory chimneys. Mt. Auburn ts on a sort of promontory which juts out into the city; it is on a level with the tops of the smoke stacks and it catches all the soot that the air can carry that far.
Judge and Mrs. Taft had come home from their European mission in time for our wedding. Judge Taft had been ill in St. Petersburg and had given his family a great deal of anxiety, but he was now settled down to the business of quiet recuperation and the enjoyment of well-earned rest.
My husband’s father was “gentle” beyond anything I ever knew. He was a man of tremendous firmness of purpose and just as set in his views as any one well could be, but he was one of the most lovable men that ever lived because he had a wide tolerance and a strangely “understanding sympathy” for everybody. He had a great many friends, and to knew him was to know why this was so.
Mr. Taft’s mother, though more formal, was also very kindly and made my visit to her home as a bride full of
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