They had hoped to secure the Villa Papiniano, under Fiesole, near Professor Fiske, but negotiations for it had fallen through.  The Villa Quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills.  Yet now in the retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid.  Its garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that a garden of Italy should be—­such a garden as Maxfield Parrish might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity—­the accumulation of dead years.  Its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look.  In a way it suggested Arnold Bocklin’s “Todteninsel,” and it might well have served as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the bourne of silence.

The house itself, one of the most picturesque of the old Florentine suburban palaces, was historically interesting, rather than cheerful.  The rooms, in number more than sixty, though richly furnished, were vast and barnlike, and there were numbers of them wholly unused and never entered.  There was a dearth of the modern improvements which Americans have learned to regard as a necessity, and the plumbing, such as it was, was not always in order.  The place was approached by narrow streets, along which the more uninviting aspects of Italy were not infrequent.  Youth and health and romance might easily have reveled in the place; but it seems now not to have been the best choice for that frail invalid, to whom cheer and brightness and freshness and the lovelier things of hope meant always so much.—­[Villa Quarto has recently been purchased by Signor P. de Ritter Lahony, and thoroughly restored and refreshed and beautified without the sacrifice of any of its romantic features.]—­Neither was the climate of Florence all that they had hoped for.  Their former sunny winter had misled them.  Tradition to the contrary, Italy—­or at least Tuscany—­is not one perpetual dream of sunlight.  It is apt to be damp and cloudy; it is likely to be cold.  Writing to MacAlister, Clemens said: 

Florentine sunshine?  Bless you, there isn’t any.  We have heavy fogs every morning & rain all day.  This house is not merely large, it is vast—­therefore I think it must always lack the home feeling.

His dissatisfaction in it began thus early, and it grew as one thing after another went wrong.  With it all, however, Mrs. Clemens seemed to gain a little, and was glad to see company—­a reasonable amount of company—­to brighten her surroundings.

Clemens began to work and wrote a story or two, and those lively articles about the Italian language.

To Twichell he reported progress: