for which are to be sought.  As to Pisa, she liked it just as we like it.  Oh, it is so beautiful and so full of repose, yet not desolate:  it is rather the repose of sleep than of death.  Then after the first ten days of rain, which seemed to refer us fatally to Alfieri’s ‘piove e ripiove,’ came as perpetual a divine sunshine, such cloudless, exquisite weather that we ask whether it may not be June instead of November.  Every day I am out walking while the golden oranges look at me over the walls, and when I am tired Robert and I sit down on a stone to watch the lizards.  We have been to your seashore, too, and seen your island, only he insists on it (Robert does) that it is not Corsica but Gorgona, and that Corsica is not in sight. Beautiful and blue the island was, however, in any case.  It might have been Romero’s instead of either.  Also we have driven up to the foot of mountains, and seen them reflected down in the little pure lake of Ascuno, and we have seen the pine woods, and met the camels laden with faggots all in a line.  So now ask me again if I enjoy my liberty as you expect.  My head goes round sometimes, that is all.  I never was happy before in my life.  Ah, but, of course, the painful thoughts recur!

There are some whom I love too tenderly to be easy under their displeasure, or even under their injustice.  Only it, seems to me that with time and patience my poor dearest papa will be melted into opening his arms to us—­will be melted into a clearer understanding of motives and intentions; I cannot believe that he will forget me, as he says he will, and go on thinking me to be dead rather than alive and happy.  So I manage to hope for the best, and all that remains, all my life here, is best already, could not be better or happier.  And willingly tell dear Mr. Martin I would take him and you for witnesses of it, and in the meanwhile he is not to send me tantalising messages; no, indeed, unless you really, really, should let yourselves be wafted our way, and could you do so much better at Pau? particularly if Fanny Hanford should come here.  Will she really?  The climate is described by the inhabitants as a ‘pleasant spring throughout the winter,’ and if you were to see Robert and me threading our path along the shady side everywhere to avoid the ‘excessive heat of the sun’ in this November (!) it would appear a good beginning.  We are not in the warm orthodox position by the Arno because we heard with our ears one of the best physicians of the place advise against it.  ‘Better,’ he said, ’to have cool rooms to live in and warm walks to go out along.’  The rooms we have are rather over-cool perhaps; we are obliged to have a little fire in the sitting-room, in the mornings and evenings that is; but I do not fear for the winter, there is too much difference to my feelings between this November and any English November I ever knew.  We have our dinner from the Trattoria at two o’clock, and can dine our favorite way on thrushes and chianti