It was a lovely night. The moon came up after a time as it had at Perugia and Assisi and I wandered about these old streets, feeling the rough brown walls, looking in at the open shop windows, most of them dark and lighted by street lamps, and studying always the wide, overhanging cornices. All really interesting cities are so delightfully different. London was so low, gray, foggy, heavy, drab, and commonplace; Paris was so smart, swift, wide-spaced, rococo, ultra-artistic, and fashionable; Monte Carlo was so semi-Parisian and semi-Algerian or Moorish, with sunlight and palms; Rome was so higgledy-piggledy, of various periods, with a strange mingling of modernity and antiquity, and over all blazing sunlight and throughout all cypresses; and now in Florence I found the compact, dark atmosphere, suggestive of what Paris once was, centuries before, with this distinctive feature, that the wide cornice is here an essential characteristic. It is so wide! It protrudes outward from the building line at least three or four feet and it may be much more, six or seven. One thing is certain, as I found to my utter delight on a rainy afternoon, you can take shelter under its wide reach and keep comparatively dry. Great art has been developed in making it truly ornamental and it gives the long narrow streets a most individual and, in my judgment, distinguished appearance. It was quite by accident, also, on this same evening that I came upon the Piazza del Duomo where the street cars are. I did not know where I was going until suddenly turning a corner there I saw it--the Campanile at last and a portion of the Cathedral standing out soft and fair in the moonlight! I shall always be glad that I saw it so, for the strange stripe and arabesque of its stone work,--slabs of white or cream-colored stone interwoven in lovely designs with slabs of slate-colored granite, had an almost eerie effect. It might have been something borrowed from Morocco or Arabia or the Far East. The dome, too, as I drew nearer, and the Baptistery soared upwards in a magnificent way and, although afterwards I was sorry that the municipality has never had sense enough to tear out the ruck of buildings surrounding it and leave these three monuments--the Cathedral, the Campanile, and the Baptistery--standing free and clear, as at Pisa, on a great stone platform or square,--nevertheless, cramped as I think they are, they are surely beautiful. I was not so much impressed by the interior of the cathedral. Its beauty is largely on the outside.