three years and a half ago with this, you would come to despise San Gualberto’s miraculous tree at Vallombrosa, which, being dead, gave out green leaves in recognition of his approach, as testified by the inscription—­do you remember?  But you can’t stop to-day to read mine, so rather I shall tell you of our exploit in the mountains.  Only one thing I must say first, one thing which you must forgive me for the vanity of resolving to say at last, having had it in my head very often.  There’s a detestable engraving, which, if you have the ill luck to see (and you may, because, horrible to relate, it is in the shop windows), will you have the kindness, for my sake, not to fancy like Robert?—­it being, as he says himself, the very image of ’a young man at Waterloo House, in a moment of inspiration—­“A lovely blue, ma’am."’ It is as like Robert as Flush.  And now I am going to tell you of Vallombrosa.  You heard how we meant to stay two months there, and you are to imagine how we got up at three in the morning to escape the heat (imagine me!)—­and with all our possessions and a ‘dozen of port’ (which my husband doses me with twice a day because once it was necessary) proceeded to Pelago by vettura, and from thence in two sledges, drawn each by two white bullocks up to the top of the holy mountain. (Robert was on horseback.) Precisely it must be as you left it.  Who can make a road up a house?  We were four hours going five miles, and I with all my goodwill was dreadfully tired, and scarcely in appetite for the beef and oil with which we were entertained at the House of Strangers.  We are simple people about diet, and had said over and over that we would live on eggs and milk and bread and butter during these two months.  We might as well have said that we would live on manna from heaven.  The things we had fixed on were just the impossible things.  Oh, that bread, with the fetid smell, which stuck in the throat like Macbeth’s amen!  I am not surprised, you recollect it!  The hens had ’got them to a nunnery,’ and objected to lay eggs, and the milk and the holy water stood confounded.  But of course we spread the tablecloth, just as you did, over all drawbacks of the sort; and the beef and oil, as I said, and the wine too, were liberal and excellent, and we made our gratitude apparent in Robert’s best Tuscan—­in spite of which we were turned out ignominiously at the end of five days, having been permitted to overstay the usual three days by only two.  No, nothing could move the lord abbot.  He is a new abbot, and; given to sanctity, and has set his face against women.  ‘While he is abbot,’ he said to our mediating monk, ’he will be abbot.  So he is abbot, and we had to come back to Florence.’  As I read in the ‘Life of San Gualberto,’ laid on the table for the edification of strangers, the brothers attain to sanctification, among other means, by cleaning out pigsties with their bare hands, without spade or shovel; but that is uncleanliness