so hot that we were glad of an opportunity to rent the Villa Montauto,
up on the hill of Bellosguardo, less than a mile beyond the city gate.
The villa, with two stories and an attic, must have been nearly two
hundred feet long, and was two or three rooms deep; at the hither end
rose a tower evidently much older than the house attached to it. Near
the foot of the tower grew an ancient tree, on a projecting branch of
which we soon had a swing suspended, and all of us children did some
very tall swinging. There was a little girl of ten belonging to the
estate, named Teresa, an amiable, brown-haired, homely little personage.
We admitted her to our intimacy, and swung her in the swing till she
screamed for mercy. The road from Florence, after passing our big iron
gate on the east, continued on westward, beneath the tower and the
parapet of the grounds; beyond extended the wide valley of the Arno,
with mountains hemming it in, and to the left of the mountains, every
evening, Donati's comet shone, with a golden sweep of tail subtending
twenty degrees along the horizon. The peasant folk regarded it with
foreboding; and I remember seeing in the book-shops of Rome, before we
left, pamphlets in both Italian and English, with such titles as "Will
the great comet, now rapidly approaching, strike the earth?" It did not
strike the earth, but it afforded us a magnificent spectacle during
our stay in Montauto, and the next year it was followed by war between
Austria and France and the evacuation of Venice.

The elevation of Bellosguardo sloped from the villa north and east, and
this declivity was occupied by a podere of some dozen acres, on which
grew grape-vines, olive and fig trees. Every morning, about ten o'clock,
the peasants on the estate would come in loaded with grapes, which they
piled up on a large table in the reception-hall on the ground floor. We
ate them by handfuls, but were never able to finish them. Between times
we would go out among the fruit trees and devour fresh figs, luscious
with purple pulp. I had three or four rooms to myself at the western
extremity of the house; they were always cool on the hottest days. There
I was wont to retire to pursue my literary labors; I was still writing
works on conchology. My sister Una had rooms on the ground floor,
adjoining the chapel. They were haunted by the ghost of a nun, and
several times the candle which she took in there at night was moved by
invisible hands from its pla