Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

anne g. X. o30tta
It would be but an incomplete enumeration of the
qualities that met in this beloved person were no
mention made of her large and genial sense of humor
and of her abiding young power of participation in
mirth. The quick and felicitous touch, both stimulating and contributing repartee, was as characteristic of her as were the earnestness and seriousness
which the grave occasion, the philosophic consideration, evoked. As an instance of this humor the following poem addressed to the writer by Mrs. Botta
from her city home in summer, may be quoted:
A SUMMER IDYL.
The city is dreary and dusty and lone,
The Smiths and the Joneses and Jenkinses gone;
The doors are all barred, and the shutters all down,
And nobody left in this desolate town
Save the sweeper who wearily loiters and lags,
The ashman, and he who cries " Bottles and rags!"
And a hurrying crowd one knows nothing about,
Though each one of them somebody cares for, no doubt;
The streets everywhere are plowed into a rut,
For putting down pipes that never stay put.
Gazing up from my window above may be scanned
A strip of the sky as wide as my hand;
And then, looking earthward, may dimly be seen
At least a square yard once of emerald green;
But now from the heat and sewer-gas, behold!
It has taken the favorite hue of old gold.
Then the odors,-not Milton's Sabean, I own,
Nor yet those that Coleridge found at Cologne,
But here to our trained, tried olfactories known,
As the Hunter's Point perfume-from boiling old bone.
You boast of your singing birds lodged in the trees,
Of the dash of the waves, the sigh of the breeze,
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