g, moreover, that in your love I have every help for
remaining patient. It is too much to hope, I suppose, that the "truce"
sets you free now, and that you could meet us here after all, and prolong
our stay indefinitely? I know one besides myself who would be glad, and
would welcome an outside excuse dearly.

For, oh, the funniness of near and dear things! Arthur's heart is laid
up with a small love affair, and it is the comicalest of internal
maladies. He is screwing up courage to tell me all about it, and I write
in haste before my mouth is sealed by his confidences. I fancy I know
the party, an energetic little mortal whom we met at Lucerne, where
Arthur lingered while we came on to Florence. She talked vaguely of
being in Venice some time this autumn; and the vagueness continues.
Arthur, in consequence, roams round disconsolately with no interest but
in hotel books. And for fear lest we should gird up his loins and drag
him away with us out of Paradisal possibilities, he is forever praising
Venice as a resting-place, and saying he wants to be nowhere else. The
bathing just keeps him alive; but when put to it to explain what charms
him since pictures do not, and architecture only slightly, he says in
exemplary brotherly fashion that he likes to see me completing my
education and enthusiasms,--and does not realize with how foreign an
air that explanation sits upon his shoulders.

I saw to-day a remnant of your patron saint, and for your sake
transferred a kiss to it, Italian fashion, with my thumb and the sign of
the cross. I hope it will do you good. Also, I have been up among the
galleries of St. Mark's, and about the roof and the west front where
somebody or another painted his picture of the bronze horses.

The pigeons get to recognize people personally, and grow more intimate
every time we come. I even conceive they make favorites, for I had three
pecking food out of my mouth to-day and refusing to take it in any other
fashion, and they coo and say thank you before and after every seed they
take or spill. They are quite the pleasantest of all the Italian
beggars--and the cleanest.

Your friend pressed us in to tea yesterday: I think less for the sake of
giving us tea than that we should see his palace, or rather his first
floor, in which alone he seems to lose himself. I have no idea for
measurements, but I imagine his big sala is about eighty feet long and
perhaps twenty-five feet across, with a flat-beamed r