on.  I wonder whether they have since wanted to borrow money of him on the strength of his professions.  But you must remember we are in July; the 13th it is, and summer will go and cold weather stay (’come’ forsooth!)—­and now is the time of times.  Still I feared the rain would hinder you on Friday—­but the thunder did not frighten me—­for you:  your father must pardon me for holding most firmly with Dr. Chambers—­his theory is quite borne out by my own experience, for I have seen a man it were foolish to call a coward, a great fellow too, all but die away in a thunderstorm, though he had quite science enough to explain why there was no immediate danger at all—­whereupon his younger brother suggested that he should just go out and treat us to a repetition of Franklin’s experiment with the cloud and the kite—­a well-timed proposition which sent the Explainer down with a white face into the cellar.  What a grand sight your tree was—­is, for I see it.  My father has a print of a tree so struck—­torn to ribbons, as you describe—­but the rose-mark is striking and new to me.  We had a good storm on our last voyage, but I went to bed at the end, as I thought—­and only found there had been lightning next day by the bare poles under which we were riding:  but the finest mountain fit of the kind I ever saw has an unfortunately ludicrous association.  It was at Possagno, among the Euganean Hills, and I was at a poor house in the town—­an old woman was before a little picture of the Virgin, and at every fresh clap she lighted, with the oddest sputtering muttering mouthful of prayer imaginable, an inch of guttery candle, which, the instant the last echo had rolled away, she as constantly blew out again for saving’s sake—­having, of course, to light the smoke of it, about an instant after that:  the expenditure in wax at which the elements might be propitiated, you see, was a matter for curious calculation.  I suppose I ought to have bought the whole taper for some four or five centesimi (100 of which make 8d.  English) and so kept the countryside safe for about a century of bad weather.  Leigh Hunt tells you a story he had from Byron, of kindred philosophy in a Jew who was surprised by a thunderstorm while he was dining on bacon—­he tried to eat between-whiles, but the flashes were as pertinacious as he, so at last he pushed his plate away, just remarking with a compassionate shrug, ‘all this fuss about a piece of pork!’ By the way, what a characteristic of an Italian late evening is Summer-lightning—­it hangs in broad slow sheets, dropping from cloud to cloud, so long in dropping and dying off.  The ‘bora,’ which you only get at Trieste, brings wonderful lightning—­you are in glorious June-weather, fancy, of an evening, under green shock-headed acacias, so thick and green, with the cicalas stunning you above, and all about you men, women, rich and poor, sitting standing and coming and going—­and through all the laughter and screaming and singing,