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been driven beyond the walls after breakfast and stranded at the very

spot where the pilgrims always said "Ecco Roma," as they caught the

first glimpse of St. Peter's dome. This melodramatic entrance into

Rome, or rather pretended entrance, was the prelude to days of enchantment, and 1 returned to Europe two years later in order to spend

a winter there and to carry out a great desire to systematically study the

Catacombs. In spite of my distrust of "advantages" I was apparently

not yet so cured but that I wanted more of them.

The two years which elapsed before I again found myself in Europe

brought their inevitable changes. Family arrangements had so come *about that I had spent three or four months of each of the intervening

winters in Baltimore, where I seemed to have reached the nadir of my

nervous depression and sense of maladjustment, in spite of my interest

in the fascinating lectures given there by Lanciani of Rome, and a deft'

nite course of reading under the guidance of a Johns Hopkins lecturer

upon the United Italy movement. In the latter I naturally encountered

the influence of Mazzini, which was a source of great comfort to me,

although perhaps I went too suddenly from a contemplation of his

wonderful ethical and philosophical appeal to the workingmen of

Italy, directly to the lecture rooms at Johns Hopkins University, for I was certainly much disillusioned at this time as to the effect of intellect

tual pursuits upon moral development.

The summers were spent in the old home in northern Illinois, and

one Sunday morning I received the rite of baptism and became a member of the Presbyterian church in the village. At this time there was

certainly no outside pressure pushing me towards such a decision, and

at twenty-five one does not ordinarily take such a step from a mere

desire to conform. While I was not conscious of any emotional "conversion," I took upon myself the outward expressions of the religious

life with all humility and sincerity. It was doubtless true that I was

Weary of myself and sick of asking

What I am and what I ought to be,

and that various cherished safeguards and claims to self-dependence

had been broken into by many piteous failures. But certainly I had

been brought to the conclusion that "sincerely to give up one's conceit

or hope of being good in one's own right is the only door to the Uni