ndit; and the various sorts of disgusting
dishes sent up to look like a dinner, and to be charged for, are a
daily increasing horror and amazement to me. They succeed in getting
_everything_ bad; no exertion, no invention, could produce such
badness, I believe, anywhere else. The hills are covered for leagues
with olive trees, and the oil's bad; there are no such lovely cattle
elsewhere in the world, and the butter's bad; half the country people
are shepherds, but there's no mutton; half the old women walk about
with a pig tied to their waists, but there's no pork; the vine grows
wild anywhere, and the wine would make my teeth drop out of my head if
I took a glass of it; there are no strawberries, no oranges, no
melons, the cherries are as hard as their stones, the beans only good
for horses, or Jack and the beanstalk, and this is the size of the
biggest asparagus--

[Illustration: hand-drawn sketch of asparagus stalk]

I live here in a narrow street ten feet wide only, winding up a hill,
and it was full this morning of sheep as close as they could pack, at
least a thousand, as far as the eye could reach,--tinkle tinkle, bleat
bleat, for a quarter of an hour.

[Footnote 9: Cimabue.]

* * * * *

IN PARADISE.

ASSISI, SACRISTAN'S CELL,
_25th June_ (1874).

This letter is all upside down, and this first page written last; for
I didn't like something I had written about myself last night when I
was tired, and have torn it off.

That star you saw beat like a heart must have been a dog star. A
planet would not have twinkled. Far mightier, he, than any planet;
burning with his own planetary host doubtless round him; and, on some
speckiest of the specks of them, evangelical persons thinking our sun
was made for _them_.

Ah, Susie, I do not pass, unthought of, the many sorrows of which you
kindly tell me, to show me--for that is in your heart--how others have
suffered also.

But, Susie, _you_ expect to see your Margaret again, and you will be
happy with her in heaven. I wanted my Rosie _here_. In heaven I mean
to go and talk to Pythagoras and Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I
shan't care a bit for Rosie there, she needn't think it. What will
gray eyes and red cheeks be good for _there_?

These pious sentiments are all written in my sacristan's cell.

This extract book[10] of yours will be most precious in its