FLORENCE. 47 



there is a lucky penny for you." "Good heaven, man ! " 

 said the other. "Are you mad? Do you want to go to the 

 poor house, that you fliug- your cash about like that ? " 



The garrulous and discursive path, so to speak, by which 

 3'ou have been brought to this point, will give you an idea of 

 what might be passing in the mind of any man if he should, 

 as I did, spend many hours during the comparatively cool 

 time of the night in wandering through the old, quiet streets. 

 I say the old, quiet streets ; the newer streets are not quiet 

 b}' an\- means in the night and summer season. For once, as 

 often happened before and since, there passed under our 

 windows on the Piazza de' Pitti a band of men and women, 

 perhaps twenty persons, slowly pacing along and singing to 

 the guitar. The singing was good, the song was sweet, the 

 music really delicious, as it floated into the room. "Oh," 

 said a lady who was of our company, " I shall die if I have 

 to go back to America to live 1 " 



Episodically let me say that there was a groom who used 

 to stand outside his stable door in the Borgo SS. Apostoli and 

 sing " Sentinella vada bene" so ravishingly that I often 

 made occasion to go round that way at the proper time. And 

 again- — not the same subject continued — one lovely, sun- 

 shiny morning in the winter time a regiment of 1700 or iSoo 

 men was passing along the Lung' Arno. Their music was a 

 quickstep, played on a single bugle, and blown out of the 

 brass with such true, crisp, delightful joyousness as would 

 have led any man to death or glorj'. 



My wanderings — you will have to submit to a good deal 

 of the first person singular — took me often into the Via de" 

 Bardi, where Romola used to live. And here there is some- 

 thing really interesting to be seen, and which, I am sorry to 

 say, I have not found noticed in any book. You shall mark, 

 as you pass along, many shapely arches of cut stone, neatly 

 filled up with similar masonry ; the contours of the old 

 entirely undisturbed, but only exactly reached — if I explain 

 myself — by the new. On inquiry there came out a good deal 



