reason a hearty love of truth is a great
preservative from sin in general.

Your letters, directed either to Rome or here, to the care of Edward
Sartoris, have reached me hitherto safely and punctually....

My sister particularly begs me to tell you that she rides ("a-horseback,
you cuckoo!") between twelve and sixteen miles almost every day. I
cannot clearly tell whether she has grown thinner or I have grown used
to her figure.

The heat is beginning to be very oppressive, and I wish I was in
England, for I hate hot weather. The whole range of the Sabine Hills, as
I see them from my window here, look baked and parched and misty, in the
glare beyond the tawny-colored Campagna. Every flower in the garden has
bloomed itself away; the trees loll their heads to the hot gusts of the
sirocco, mocking one with the enchanting beckoning gesture of a breeze,
while the air is in truth like a blast from an oven or the draught at
the mouth of a furnace.

I walk before breakfast, and steep myself in perspiration; and get into
the fountain in the garden afterwards, and steep myself in cold water;
and by dint of the double process, live in tolerable comfort the rest of
the day. And I have no right to complain, for this is temperate to the
summer climate of Philadelphia.

Mary and Martha Somerville are paying us a visit of a few days, and I
have spent the last two mornings in a vast, princely, empty marble
gallery here, teaching them to dance the cachuca; and I wish you could
have seen Mrs. Somerville watching our exercises. With her eyeglasses to
her eyes, the gentle gentlewoman sat silently contemplating our
evolutions, and as we brought them to a conclusion, and stood (_not_
like the Graces) puffing and panting round her, unwilling not to say
some kindly word of commendation of our effort, she meekly observed,
"It's very pretty, very graceful, very"--a pause--"ladylike." She spoke
without any malicious intention whatever, dear lady, but she surely left
out the _un_. Do you not think it is time I should begin to think of
growing old? or do your nieces do anything more juvenile than this, with
all their ball-going?

God bless you, my dear Harriet. Good-bye.

I am ever, as ever yours,
FANNY.

FRASCATI, Wednesday, September 2nd, 1846.
MY DEAREST HARRIET,

... I think that the women who have contempla