Yesterday we went to see Carpaccio at his best in San Giorgio di Schiavone:  two are St. George pictures, three St. Jeromes, and two of some other saint unknown to me.  The St. Jerome series is really a homily on the love and pathos of animals.  First is St. Jerome in his study with a sort of unclipped white poodle in the pictorial place of honor, all alone on a floor beautifully swept and garnished, looking up wistfully to his master busy at writing (a Benjy saying, “Come and take me for a walk, there’s a good saint!").  Scattered among the adornments of the room are small bronzes of horses and, I think, birds.  So, of course, these being his tastes, when St. Jerome goes into the wilderness, a lion takes to him, and accompanies him when he pays a call on the monks in a neighboring monastery.  Thereupon, holy men of little faith, the entire fraternity take to their heels and rush upstairs, the hindermost clinging to the skirts of the formermost to be hauled the quicker out of harm’s way.  And all the while the lion stands incorrectly offering the left paw, and Jerome with shrugs tries to explain that even the best butter wouldn’t melt in his dear lion’s mouth.  After that comes the tragedy.  St. Jerome lies dying in excessive odor of sanctity, and all the monks crowd round him with prayers and viaticums, and the ordinary stuffy pieties of a “happy death,” while Jerome wonders feebly what it is he misses in all this to-do for which he cares so little.  And there, elbowed far out into the cold, the lion lies and lifts his poor head and howls because he knows his master is being taken from him.  Quite near to him, fastened to a tree, a queer, nondescript, crocodile-shaped dog runs out the length of its tether to comfort the disconsolate beast:  but la bete humaine has got the whip-hand of the situation.  In another picture is a parrot that has just mimicked a dog, or called “Carlo!” and then laughed:  the dog turns his head away with a sleek, sheepish, shy look, exactly as a sensitive dog does when you make fun of him.

These are, perhaps, mere undercurrents of pictures which are quite glorious in color and design, but they help me to love Carpaccio to distraction; and when the others lose me, they hunt through all the Carpaccios in Venice till they find me!

Love me a little more if possible while I am so long absent from you!  What I do and what I think go so much together now, that you will take what I write as the most of me that it is possible to cram in, coming back to you to share everything.

Under such an Italian sky as to-day how I would like to see your face!  Here, dearest, among these palaces you would be in your peerage, for I think you have some southern blood in you.

Curious that, with all my fairness, somebody said to me to-day, “But you are not quite English, are you?” And I swore by the nine gods of my ancestry that I was nothing else.  But the look is in us:  my father had a foreign air, but made up for it by so violent a patriotism that Uncle N. used to call him “John Bull let loose.”