head, when he rode on Wilson’s knee five or six miles the other day to a village in the mountains—­screaming for joy, she said.  He is not six months yet by a fortnight!  His father loves him; passionately, and the sentiment is reciprocated, I assure you.  We have had the coolest of Italian summers at these Baths of Lucca, the thermometer at the hottest hour of the hottest day only at seventy-six, and generally at sixty-eight or seventy.  The nights invariably cool.  Now the freshness of the air is growing almost too fresh.  I only hope we shall be able (for the cold) to keep our intention of staying here till the end of October, I have enjoyed it so entirely, and shall be so sorry to break off this happy silence into the Austrian drums at poor Florence.  And then we want to see the vintage.  Some grapes are ripe already, but it is not vintage time.  We have every kind of good fruit, great water-melons, which with both arms I can scarcely carry, at twopence halfpenny each, and figs and peaches cheap in proportion.  And the place agrees with Baby, and has done good to my husband’s spirits, though the only ‘amusement’ or distraction he has is looking at the mountains and climbing among the woods with me.  Yes, we have been reading some French romances, ‘Monte Cristo,’ for instance, I for the second time—­but I have liked it, to read it with him.  That Dumas certainly has power; and to think of the scramble there was for his brains a year or two ago in Paris!  For a man to write so much and so well together is a miracle.  Do you mean that they have left off writing—­those French writers—­or that they have tired you out with writing that looks faint beside the rush of facts, as the range of French politics show those?  Has not Eugene Sue been illustrating the passions?  Somebody told me so.  Do you tell me how you like the French President, and whether he will ever, in your mind, sit on Napoleon’s throne.  It seems to me that he has given proof, as far as the evidence goes, of prudence, integrity, and conscientious patriotism; the situation is difficult, and he fills it honorably.  The Rome business has been miserably managed; this is the great blot on the character of his government.  But I, for my own part (my husband is not so minded), do consider that the French motive has been good, the intention pure, the occupation of Rome by the Austrians being imminent and the French intervention the only means (with the exception of a European war) of saving Rome from the hoof of the Absolutists.  At the same time if Pius IX. is the obstinate idiot he seems to be, good and tenderhearted man as he surely is, and if the old abuses are to be restored, why Austria might as well have done her own dirty work and saved French hands from the disgrace of it.  It makes us two very angry.  Robert especially is furious.  We are not within reach of the book you speak of, ‘Portraits des Orateurs Francais’ oh, we might nearly as well live on a desert island as far as modern books go.  And here, at Lucca, even