the possibility of St. Lawrence’s ecstasies on the gridiron.  Very hot it certainly has been and is, yet there have been cool intermissions; and as we have spacious and airy rooms, and as Robert lets me sit all day in my white dressing gown without a single masculine criticism, and as we can step out of the window on a sort of balcony terrace which is quite private and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as we live upon water melons and iced water and figs and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with an angelic patience and felicity which really are edifying.  We tried to make the monks of Vallombrosa let us stay with them for two months, but their new abbot said or implied that Wilson and I stank in his nostrils, being women, and San Gualberto, the establishes of their order, had enjoined on them only the mortification of cleaning out pigsties without fork or shovel.  So here a couple of women besides was (as Dickens’s American said) ’a piling it up rayther too mountainious.’  So we were sent away at the end of five days.  So provoking!  Such scenery, such hills, such a sea of hills looking alive among the clouds. Which rolled, it was difficult to discern.  Such pine woods, supernaturally silent, with the ground black as ink, such chestnut and beech forests hanging from the mountains, such rocks and torrents, such chasms and ravines.  There were eagles there, too, [and] there was no road.  Robert went on horseback, and Flush, Wilson, and I were drawn in a sledge (i.e. an old hamper, a basket wine hamper without a wheel) by two white bullocks up the precipitous mountains.  Think of my travelling in that fashion in those wild places at four o’clock in the morning, a little frightened, dreadfully tired, but in an ecstasy of admiration above all!  It was a sight to see before one died and went away to another world.  Well, but being expelled ignominiously at the end of five days, we had to come back to Florence, and find a new apartment cooler than the old, and wait for dear Mr. Kenyon.  And dear Mr. Kenyon does not come (not this autumn, but he may perhaps at the first dawn of spring), and on September 20 we take up our knapsacks and turn our faces towards Rome, I think, creeping slowly along, with a pause at Arezzo, and a longer pause at Perugia, and another perhaps at Terni.  Then we plan to take an apartment we have heard of, over the Tarpeian Rock, and enjoy Rome as we have enjoyed Florence.  More can scarcely be.  This Florence is unspeakably beautiful, by grace both of nature and art, and the wheels of life slide on upon the grass (according to continental ways) with little trouble and less expense.  Dinner, ‘unordered,’ comes through the streets and spreads itself on our table, as hot as if we had smelt cutlets hours before.  The science of material life is understood here and in France.  Now tell me, what right has England to be the dearest country in the world?  But I love dearly dear England, and we hope to spend many