that are as old as the days of Augustus, and the fire-flies and the magnolia groves, and the peasants who are always singing. But he won't go there. He says it is a _seccatura_. Everything is a _seccatura_. He only likes places where he can meet all the world. "Paris will be a solitude, too, never fear," he said, very petulantly; "but there will be all the _petits théâtres_ and the open-air concerts, and we can dine in the Bois and down the river, and we can run to Trouville. It will be better than rain, rain, rain, and nothing to look at except your amiable aunt's big horses and big trees. I adore horses, and trees are not bad if they are planted away from the house, but, viewed as eternal companions, one may have too much of them." And I am his eternal companion, but it seems already I don't count! I have not said anything. I know one oughtn't. But Piero saw how it vexed me, and it made him cross. "_Cara mia_," he said, "why did you not tell me before we married that you intended me to be buried for ever in a box under wet leaves like a rose that is being sent to the market? I should have known what to expect, and I do not like wet leaves." I could not help reminding him that he had been ever, ever so anxious to come to Coombe. Then he laughed, but he was very cross too. "Could I tell, _anima mia_," he cried, "that Coombe was situated in a succession of lagoons, contains not one single French novel, is seven miles asunder from its own railway station, and is blessed with a population of sulky labourers? What man have I seen since I have been here except your parish priest, who mumbles, wears spectacles, and tries to give me a tract against the Holy Father? In this country you do not know what it is to be warm. You do not know what sunshine is like. You take an umbrella when you go in the garden. You put on a waterproof to go and hear one little, shivering nightingale sing in a wet elder bush. I tell you I am tired of your country, absolutely tired. You are an angel. No doubt you are an angel; but you cannot console me for the intolerable emptiness of this intolerable life, where there is nothing on earth to do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and drive in a dog-cart." All this he said in one breath, in a flash of forked lightning, as it were. Now that I write it down, it does not seem so very dreadful; but as he, with the most fiery scorn, the most contemptuous passion, said it, I assure you it was terrible. It revealed, just as the flash of lightning would show a gravel pit, how fearfully bored he has been all the time I thought he was happy!' _From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset._ 'Men are very easily bored, my dear, if they have any brains. It is only the dull ones who are not.' _From the Principessa di San Zenone to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester._