On his arrival Browning had bought a plain glass inkstand and a few
wooden penholders; they were still there, on a blue-patterned china
plate, just as he had left them. I reverently put them aside, but I
might as well have used them; for just as he would never allow me to
make the slightest fuss of him, the living friend, so he would not have
expected me to stand on ceremony with the inanimate objects that
survived him. A pen was just a pen, as "A flower is just a flower."

Asolo boasted of a theatre, and the performances must have been none of
the worst, for, out of twenty, Browning only missed three. He would sit
in his friend Mrs. Bronson's box, and follow the actors as they told the
story of Hamlet, Othello, or Mary Queen of Scots, or as they played
Goldoni's popular comedies. The performance usually wound up with a
short farce. From that he would escape, leaving Gigi (that is Luigi),
who was his frequent companion, to do the screaming laughter. About
half-past eleven or twelve he got home, and by five or six in the
morning he was up again. His bedroom was about 16 feet by 9, and 10 feet
high. A really good rococo design, speaking of an artistic past,
embossed and picked out in grey, decorated the whitewashed walls.
Rafters brought out the irregularities of the ceiling, and bricks, very
much wrinkled and worn with age, paved the floor. Signora Tabacchi had
offered to procure a carpet, but had met with an energetic refusal.
There was a funny little looking-glass, and a wash-hand stand with a
diminutive basin, and over the glass door a towel was neatly tacked to
insure privacy.

And what in this land of vistas greeted the poet's eye as he opened his
shutters? A blank wall and another set of shutters. They would be opened
presently to be sure when the sun left the neighbour's wall, and then a
flood of light would burst into the centre corridor of his house, and
the reflections from the marble floor would carry the quivering rays
along to another window beyond, through which you caught a lovely
glimpse of the hills on the other side of the valley. In that particular
glimpse Browning delighted. When his son came to Asolo, he was struck,
as I was later, by the uncongenial outlook.

"Wait, Pen, till they open those shutters," Browning had said. Pen
waited and was duly impressed and pleased. It was well so, for had it
been otherwise, his father's pleasure would have been incomplete.

The people of Asolo are of the kin