no
room for me, who hope some day to go back there and spend an old age of
luxurious leisure. There was not only steam-heat in the public rooms of
the ground floor, but there was furnace heat in all the corridors, and
there were fireplaces in certain chambers, which also looked out on the
sea, to Corsica and Elba and other isles of it, and would be full of sun
as soon as the cold rain closed a fortnight's activity. That which
diffused a blander atmosphere than steam or radiator, register and
hearth, however, was the kind will, the benevolent intelligence, which
imagined us, and which would not then let us go. We had become not only
agnostic as respected the possibility of warmth in Leghorn, we were open
sceptics, aggressive infidels. But the landlord himself followed us from
one room to another, lighting fires here and there on the hearth, making
us feel the warm air rising from the furnace, calling us to witness by
palpation the heat of the radiators, soothing our fears, and coaxing our
unfaith. His wife joined him in Italian and his son in English, and, if
I do not say that these amiable people were worthy all the prosperity
which was not then apparent in their establishment, may I never be
comfortably lodged or fed again. Our daily return for what we got was a
poor twelve francs each; but fancy a haughty American landlord caressing
us with such sweet and reassuring civility for any sum of money! Those
gentle people made themselves our friends; there was nothing they would
not do, or try to do, for us, in the vast, pink palace where we were
never twenty guests together, and mostly eight or ten, with the run of a
reading-room where there were the latest papers and periodicals from
London and Paris, and with a kitchen whence we were served the best
luncheons and dinners we ate in Europe.

The place had the true out-of-season charm. There were two stately
dining-rooms besides the one where we dined, and there were pleasant
spaces where we had afternoon tea or after-dinner coffee, and from which
a magnificent stairway ascended to the upper halls, and a quiet lift
waited our orders, with the landlord or his son to take us up; and so
lonely and quiet and gentle, with porters and chambermaids speaking
beautiful Tuscan, and watchful attendants everywhere prophesying and
fulfilling our wants. It was a keeping to make the worst believe in
their merit, and we were not the worst. Outside, the environment
flattered or rewarded us