To Mrs. Jameson Bagni di Lucca:  August 11, 1849.

I thank you, dearest friend, for your most affectionate and welcome letter would seem to come by instinct, and we have thanked you in our thoughts long before this moment, when I begin at last to write some of them.  Do believe that to value your affection and to love you back again are parts of our life, and that it must be always delightful to us to read in your handwriting or to hear in your voice that we are not exiled from your life.  Give us such an assurance whenever you can.  Shall we not have it face to face at Florence, when the booksellers let you go?  And meantime there is the post; do write to us....  Did you ever see this place, I wonder?  The coolness, the charm of the mountains, whose very heart you seem to hear beating in the rush of the little river, the green silence of the chestnut forests, and the seclusion which anyone may make for himself by keeping clear of the valley-villages; all these things drew us.  We took a delightful apartment over the heads of the whole world in the highest house of the Bagni Caldi, where only the donkeys and the portantini can penetrate, and where we sit at the open windows and hear nothing but the cicale.  Not a mosquito! think of that!  The thermometer ranges from sixty-eight to seventy-four, but the seventy-four has been a rare excess:  the nights, mornings, and evenings are exquisitely cool.  Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights, and neither by night nor day have the fear of picnics before our eyes.  We were observing the other day that we never met anybody except a monk girt with a rope, now and then, or a barefooted peasant.  The sight of a pink parasol never startles us into unpleasant theories of comparative anatomy.  One cause, perhaps, may be that on account of political matters it is a delightfully ‘bad season,’ but, also, we are too high for the ordinary walkers, who keep to the valley and the flatter roads.  Robert is better, looking better, and in more healthy spirits; and we are both enjoying this great sea of mountains and our way of life here altogether.  Of course, we remembered to go back to Florence for baby and the rest of our little establishment, and we mean to stay as long as we can, perhaps to the end of October.  Baby is in the triumph of health and full-blown roses, and as he does not hide himself in the woods like his ancestors, but smiles at everybody, he is the most popular of possible babies....  We had him baptised before we left Florence, without godfathers and godmothers, in the simplicities of the French Lutheran Church.  I gave him your kiss as a precious promise that you would love him one day like a true dear Aunt Nina; and I promise you on my part that he shall be taught to understand both the happiness and the honour of it.  Robert is expecting a visit from his sister in the course of this autumn.  She has suffered much, and the change