no one was to be seen.  Yet the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation.  The palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean; behind those windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable life.  It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness—­everywhere pursued by Railways—­still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those well-preserved old palaces.  No doubt it would be worth more to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely income far exceeding his expenditure.  To be sure, the Tower of Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long razed to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place where it stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great Piazza where stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in the world, after that of St. Mark’s Place in Venice.  There is the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistery, there is the lovely Campo-Santo, and there—­somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger—­is the much-experienced cicerone who shows you through the edifices.  Yours is the fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in thus becoming a contribution to statistics.

We entered the Duomo, in our new friend’s custody, and we saw the things which it was well to see.  There was mass, or some other ceremony, transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which travellers view objects of interest.  Then we ascended the Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower’s inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the Campanile’s appearance in pictures, till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the blue sky above our heads.  There the sensation was too terrible for endurance,—­even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save it from being monstrous to us,—­and we were glad to hurry away from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo.

Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you.  Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time specified,