October, as everything depends upon the coming in of the cold.  It will be the end of October, won’t it, before Gerardine can reach Florence?  I wish I knew.  We have made an excursion into the mountains, five miles deep, with all our household, baby and all, on horseback and donkeyback, and people open their eyes at our having performed such an exploit—­I and the child.  Because it is five miles straight up the Duomo; you wonder how any horse could keep its footing, the way is so precipitous, up the exhausted torrent courses, and with a palm’s breadth between you and the headlong ravines.  Such scenery.  Such a congregation of mountains:  looking alive in the stormy light we saw them by.  We dined with the goats, and baby lay on my shawl rolling and laughing.  He wasn’t in the least tired, not he!  I won’t say so much for myself.  The Mr. Stuart who lectured here on Shakespeare (I think I told you that) couldn’t get through a lecture without quoting you, and wound up by a declaration that no English critic had done so much for the divine poet as a woman—­Mrs. Jameson.  He appears to be a cultivated and refined person, and especially versed in German criticism, and we mean to use his society a little when we return to Florence, where he resides....  What am I to say about Robert’s idleness and mine?  I scold him about it in a most anti-conjugal manner, but, you know, his spirits and nerves have been shaken of late; we must have patience.  As for me, I am much better, and do something, really, now and then.  Wait, and you shall have us both on you; too soon, perhaps.  May God bless you.  How are your friends?  Lady Byron, Madame de Goethe.  The dreadful cholera has made us anxious about England.

Your ever affectionate
BA.

Mr. Browning adds the following note: 

Dear Aunt Nina,—­Ba will have told you everything, and how we wish you and Geddie all manner of happiness.  I hope we shall be in Florence when she passes through it.  The place is otherwise distasteful to me, with the creeping curs and the floggers of the same.  But the weather is breaking up here, and I suppose we ought to go back soon.  Shall you indeed come to Italy next year?  That will indeed be pleasant to expect.  We hope to go to England in the spring.  What comes of ‘hoping,’ however, we [know] by this time.

Ever yours affectionately,
R.B.

To Miss Mitford Bagni di Lucca:  October 2, 1849.

Thank you, my dearest Miss Mitford:  It is great comfort to know that you are better, and that the cholera does not approach your neighbourhood.  My brothers and sisters have gone to Worthing for a few weeks; and though my father (dearest Papa!) is not persuadeable, I fear, into joining them, yet it is something to know that the horrible pestilence is abating in London.  Oh, it has made me so anxious:  I have caught with such a frightened haste at the newspaper to read the ‘returns,’ leaving even such subjects as Rome and the President’s