[Footnote 152:  Miss Gerardine Bate, Mrs. Jameson’s niece.]

To Miss Mitford Pisa:  December 19, [1846].

Ever dearest Miss Mitford, your kindest letter is three times welcome as usual.  On the day you wrote it in the frost, I was sitting out of doors, just in my summer mantilla, and complaining ’of the heat this December!’ But woe comes to the discontented.  Within these three or four days we too have had frost—­yes, and a little snow, for the first time, say the Pisans, during five years.  Robert says that the mountains are powdered toward Lucca, and I, who cannot see the mountains, can see the cathedral—­the Duomo—­how it glitters whitely at the summit, between the blue sky and its own walls of yellow marble.  Of course I do not stir an inch from the fire, yet have to struggle a little against my old languor.  Only, you see, this can’t last! it is exceptional weather, and, up to the last few days, has been divine.  And then, after all we talk of frost, my bedroom, which has no fireplace, shows not an English sign on the window, and the air is not metallic as in England.  The sun, too, is so hot that the women are seen walking with fur capes and parasols, a curious combination.

I hope you had your visit from Mr. Chorley, and that you both had the usual pleasure from it.  Indeed I am touched by what you tell me, and was touched by his note to my husband, written in the first surprise; and because Robert has the greatest regard for him, besides my own personal reasons, I do count him in the forward rank of our friends.  You will hear that he has obliged us by accepting a trusteeship to a settlement, forced upon me in spite of certain professions or indispositions of mine; but as my husband’s gifts, I had no right, it appeared, by refusing it to place him in a false position for the sake of what dear Mr. Kenyon calls my ‘crotchets.’  Oh, dear Mr. Kenyon!  His kindness and goodness to us have been past thinking of, past thanking for; we can only fall into silence.  He has thrust his hand into the fire for us by writing to papa himself, by taking up the management of my small money-matters when nearer hands let them drop, by justifying us with the whole weight of his personal influence; all this in the very face of his own habits and susceptibilities.  He has resolved that I shall not miss the offices of father, brother, friend, nor the tenderness and sympathy of them all.  And this man is called a mere man of the world, and would be called so rightly if the world were a place for angels.  I shall love him dearly and gratefully to my last breath; we both shall....