the necessity of change of air (for my part, I seemed to myself more fit to change the world than the air), and Robert carried me into the railroad like a baby, and off we came here to Siena.  We took a villa a mile and a half from the town, a villa situated on a windy hill (called ’poggio al vento’), with magnificent views from all the windows, and set in the midst of its own vineyard and olive ground, apple trees and peach trees, not to speak of a little square flower-garden, for which we pay eleven shillings one penny farthing the week; and at the end of these three weeks, our medical comforter’s prophecy, to which I listened so incredulously, is fulfilled, and I am able to walk a mile, and am really as well as ever in all essential respects....  Our poor little darling, too (see what disasters!), was ill four-and-twenty hours from a species of sunstroke, and frightened us with a heavy hot head and glassy staring eyes, lying in a half-stupor.  Terrible, the silence that fell suddenly upon the house, without the small pattering feet and the singing voice.  But God spared us; he grew quite well directly and sang louder than ever.  Since we came here his cheeks have turned into roses....

What still further depressed me during our latter days at Florence was the dreadful event in America—­the loss of our poor friend Madame Ossoli,[204] affecting in itself, and also through association with that past, when the arrowhead of anguish was broken too deeply into my life ever to be quite drawn out.  Robert wanted to keep the news from me till I was stronger, but we live too close for him to keep anything from me, and then I should have known it from the first letter or visitor, so there was no use trying.  The poor Ossolis spent part of their last evening in Italy with us, he and she and their child, and we had a note from her off Gibraltar, speaking of the captain’s death from smallpox.  Afterwards it appears that her child caught the disease and lay for days between life and death; recovered, and then came the final agony.  ‘Deep called unto deep,’ indeed.  Now she is where there is no more grief and ‘no more sea;’ and none of the restless in this world, none of the ship-wrecked in heart ever seemed to me to want peace more than she did.  We saw much of her last winter; and over a great gulf of differing opinion we both felt drawn strongly to her.  High and pure aspiration she had—­yes, and a tender woman’s heart—­and we honoured the truth and courage in her, rare in woman or man.  The work she was preparing upon Italy would probably have been more equal to her faculty than anything previously produced by her pen (her other writings being curiously inferior to the impressions her conversation gave you); indeed, she told me it was the only production to which she had given time and labour.  But, if rescued, the manuscript would be nothing but the raw material.  I believe nothing was finished; nor, if finished, could the work have been otherwise than deeply coloured