ence to Genoa, and to Florence, where
presently they were installed in the Villa Reale di Quarto, a fine old
Italian palace built by Cosimo more than four centuries ago. In later
times it has been occupied and altered by royal families of Wurtemberg
and Russia. Now it was the property of the Countess Massiglia, from whom
Clemens had leased it.

They had hoped to secure the Villa Papiniano, under Fiesole, near
Professor Fiske, but negotiations for it had fallen through. The Villa
Quarto, as it is usually called, was a more pretentious place and as
beautifully located, standing as it does in an ancient garden looking
out over Florence toward Vallombrosa and the Chianti hills. Yet now in
the retrospect, it seems hardly to have been the retreat for an invalid.
Its garden was supernaturally beautiful, all that one expects that
a garden of Italy should be--such a garden as Maxfield Parrish
might dream; but its beauty was that which comes of antiquity--the
accumulation of dead years. Its funereal cypresses, its crumbling walls
and arches, its clinging ivy and moldering marbles, and a clock
that long ago forgot the hours, gave it a mortuary look. In a way it
suggested Arnold Bocklin's "Todteninsel," and it might well have served
as the allegorical setting for a gateway to the bourne of silence.

The house itself, one of the most picturesque of the old Florentine
suburban palaces, was historically interesting, rather than cheerful.
The rooms, in number more than sixty, though richly furnished, were vast
and barnlike, and there were numbers of them wholly unused and never
entered. There was a dearth of the modern improvements which Americans
have learned to regard as a necessity, and the plumbing, such as it was,
was not always in order. The place was approached by narrow streets,
along which the more uninviting aspects of Italy were not infrequent.
Youth and health and romance might easily have reveled in the place; but
it seems now not to have been the best choice for that frail invalid, to
whom cheer and brightness and freshness and the lovelier things of hope
meant always so much.--[Villa Quarto has recently been purchased by
Signor P. de Ritter Lahony, and thoroughly restored and refreshed
and beautified without the sacrifice of any of its romantic
features.]--Neither was the climate of Florence all that they had
hoped for. Their former sunny winter had misled them. Tradition to the
contrary, Italy--or at least Tuscany--is