ce and set down elsewhere. Ghostly voices
called to us, and various unaccountable noises were heard now and then,
both within and without the house; but we children did not mind them,
not having been bred in the fear of spirits. Indeed, at the instance
of Mrs. Browning, who was often with us, we held spirit seances,
Miss Shepard being the medium, though she mildly protested. Long
communications were written down, but the sceptics were not converted,
nor were the believers discouraged. "I discern in the alleged
communications from my wife's mother," wrote my father, "much of her own
beautiful fancy and many of her preconceived ideas, although thinner
and weaker than at first hand. They are the echoes of her own voice,
returning out of the lovely chambers of her heart, and mistaken by her
for the tones of her mother."

Almost every day some of us made an incursion into Florence. The town
itself seemed to me more agreeable than Rome; but the Boboli Gardens
could not rival the Borghese, and the Pitti and Uffizi galleries were
not so captivating as the Vatican and the Capitol. However, the Cascine
and the Lung' Arno were delightful, and the Arno, shallow and placid,
flowing through the midst of the city, was a fairer object than the
muddy and turbulent Tiber. Men and boys bathed along the banks in the
afternoons and evenings; and the Ponte Vecchio, crowded with grotesque
little houses, was a favorite promenade of mine. There was also a large
marketplace, where the peasant women sold the produce of their farms. My
insatiable appetite for such things prompted me often to go thither
and eat everything I had money to buy. One day I consumed so many fresh
tomatoes that I had a giddiness in the back of my head, and ate no more
tomatoes for some years. But the place I best liked was the great open
square of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the statues of David and of Perseus
under the Loggia dei Lanzi, a retreat from sun and rain; and the Duomo
and Giotto's Campanile, hard by. The pavements of Florence, smooth as
the surface of stone canals, were most soothing and comfortable after
the relentless, sharp cobble-stones of Rome; the low houses that
bordered them seemed to slumber in the hot, still sunshine. What a
sunshine was that! Not fierce and feverish, as in the tropics, but soft
and intense and white. Who would not live in Florence if he could? I
think my father would have settled there but for his children, to whom
he wished to give a