The third little group of buildings and lodging-houses was called the “Bagni Caldi.”  The hotter, and, I fancy, the original springs were there, and it was altogether more retired and countrified, nestling closely among the chesnut woods.  The whole surrounding country indeed is one great chesnut forest, and the various little villages, most of them picturesque in the highest degree, which crown the summits of the surrounding hills, are all of them closely hedged in by the chesnut woods, which clothe the slopes to the top.  These villages burrow in what they live on like mice in a cheese, for many of the inhabitants never taste any other than chesnut flour bread from year’s end to year’s end.

The inhabitants of these hills, and indeed those of the duchy generally, have throughout Italy the reputation of being morally about the best population in the peninsula.  Servants from the Lucchese, and especially from the district I am here speaking of, were, and are still, I believe, much prized.  Lucca, as many readers will remember, enjoys among all the descriptive epithets popularly given to the different cities of Italy, that of Lucca la industriosa.

To us migratory English those singularly picturesque villages which capped all the hills, and were reached by curiously ancient paved mule paths zig-sagging up among the chesnut woods, seemed to have been created solely for artistic and picnic purposes.  The Saturnian nature of the life lived in them may be conceived from the information once given me by the inhabitants of one of these mountain settlements in reply to some inquiry about the time of day, that it was always noon there when the priest was ready for his dinner.

Such were the summer quarters of the English Florentine colony, temporibus illis.  There used to be, I remember, a somewhat amusingly distinctive character attributed, of course in a general way subject to exceptions, to the different groups of the English rusticating world, according to the selection of their quarters in either of the above three little settlements.  The “gay” world preferred the “Ponte,” where the gaming-tables and ballrooms were.  The more strictly “proper” people went to live at the “Villa,” where the English Church service was performed.  The invalid portion of the society, or those who wished quiet, and especially economy, sought the “Bagni Caldi.”

In a general way we all desired economy, and found it.  The price at the many hotels was nine pauls a day for board and lodging, including Tuscan wine, and was as much a fixed and invariable matter as a penny for a penny bun.  Those who wanted other wine generally brought it with them, by virtue of a ducal ordinance which specially exempted from duty all wine brought by English visitors to the Baths.