You can’t think how well the rooms look already; you must come and see them, you and dear Mr. Martin.  Three immense rooms we have, and a fourth small one for a book room and winter room—­windows opening on a little terrace, eight windows to the south; two good bedrooms behind, with a smaller terrace, and kitchen, &c., all on a first floor and Count Guidi’s favorite suite.  The Guidi were connected by marriage with the Ugolino of Pisa, Dante’s Ugolino, only we shun all traditions of the Tower of Famine, and promise to give you excellent coffee whenever you will come to give us the opportunity.  We shall have vines and myrtles and orange trees on the terrace, and I shall have a watering-pot and garden just as you do, though it must be on the bricks instead of the ground.  For temperature, the stoves are said to be very effective in the winter, and in the summer we are cool and airy; the advantage of these thick-walled palazzos is coolness in summer and warmth in winter.  I am very well and quite strong again, or rather, stronger than ever, and able to walk as far as Cellini’s Perseus in the moonlight evenings, on the other side of the Arno.  Oh, that Arno in the sunset, with the moon and evening star standing by, how divine it is!...

Think of me as ever your most affectionate
BA.

[Footnote 178:  Otherwise known as Robert Mannyng, or Robert de Brunne, author of the Handlyng Synne and a Chronicle of England.  He flourished about 1288-1338.]

To Miss Mitford Florence:  July 4, [1848].

It does grieve me, my ever dearest Miss Mitford, to hear of the suffering which has fallen upon you!  Oh, rheumatism or not, whatever the name may be, do take care, do consider, and turn your dear face toward the seaside; somewhere where you can have warm sea bathing and sea air, and be able to associate the word ‘a drive’ not with mad ponies, but the mildest of donkeys, on a flat sand.  The good it would do you is incalculable, I am certain; it is precisely a case for change of air, with quiet....

As for when you come to Florence, we won’t have ’a pony carriage between us,’ if you please, because we may have a carriage and a pair of horses and a coachman, and pay as little as for the pony-chair in England.  For three hundred a year one may live much like the Grand Duchess, and go to the opera in the evening at fivepence-halfpenny inclusive.  Indeed, poor people should have their patriotism tenderly dealt with, when, after certain experiments, they decide on living upon the whole on the Continent.  The differences are past belief, beyond expectation, and when the sunshine is thrown in, the head turns at once, and you fall straight into absenteeism.  Ah, for the ’long chats’ and the ‘having England at one another’s fireside!’ You talk of delightful things indeed.  We are very quiet, politically speaking, and though we hear now and then of melancholy mothers who have to part with their sons for Lombardy,[179] and though there are