With all the treasures of my historic reading in mind from the lives of the Medici and Savonarola to that of Michelangelo and the Florentine school of artists, I was keen to see what Florence would be like. Mrs. Q. had described it as the most individual of all the Italian cities that she had seen. She had raved over its narrow, dark, cornice-shaded streets, its fortress-like palaces, its highly individual churches and cloisters, the way the drivers of the little open vehicles plied everywhere cracking their whips, until, she said, it sounded like a Fourth of July in Janesville. I was keen to see how large the dome of the cathedral would look and whether it would really tower conspicuously over the remaining buildings of the city, and whether the Arno would look as picturesque as it did in all the photographs. The air was so soft and the sun so bright, although sinking low in the west, as the train entered the city, that I was pleased to accept, instead of the ancient atmosphere which I had anticipated, the wide streets and rows of four- and six-family apartment houses which characterize all the newer sections. They have the rich browns and creams of the earlier portion of Florence; but they are very different in their suggestion of modernity. The distant hills, as I could see from the car windows, were dotted with houses and villas occupying delightful positions above the town. Suddenly I saw the Duomo; and although I knew it only from photographs I recognized it in an instant. It spoke for itself in a large, dignified way. Over the housetops it soared like a great bubble; and some pigeons flying in the air gave it the last touch of beauty. We wound around the city in a circle--I could tell this by the shifting position of the sun--through great yards of railway-tracks with scores of engines and lines of small box-cars; and then I saw a small stream and a bridge,--nothing like the Arno, of course,--a canal; and the next thing we were rolling into a long crowded railway-station, the guards calling Firenze. I got up, gathered my overcoat and bags into my arms, signaled a _facino_ and gave them to him; and then I sought a vehicle that would convey me to the hotel for which I was bound--the Hotel de Ville on the Arno. I sat behind a fat driver while he cracked his whip endlessly above the back of a lazy horse, passing the while the showy façade of Santa Maria Novella, striped with strange bands of white and bluish gray or drab,--a pleasing effect for a church. I could see at once that the Florence of the Middle Ages was a much more condensed affair than that which now sprawls out in various directions from the Loggia dei Lanzi and the place of the cathedral.