At Arcetri, Galileo rented a villa from his pupil Esau Martellini, called “Il Gioiello” (the Gem). This was practically his prison, as the Inquisition forbade him to hold meetings, give lectures, receive friends to dinner, or “commit any action showing a want of reverence.” In 1634 his favourite daughter, a nun in the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri died, and the sick man was inconsolable, but Urban VIII, and his worthy advisers the Jesuits, continued their persecution, ordering that he was not to converse with anyone “not even the most wise and respectable person.” Through the Grand Duke he petitioned the Pope to grant him some mitigation of his rigorous imprisonment, whereupon the Inquisition commanded him to desist from further supplications on pain of instant punishment. In 1638 Galileo became blind and died four years later. Viviani describes him in his old age as “strongly built, of middle height, full-blooded, phlegmatic and very strong, but hard work and pain, both of body and mind, had debilitated his frame, so that he often fell into a languid condition.” He was a good musician and played well on the lute, a clever draughtsman, and so able an architect that the government consulted him on the new front they desired to build for the Cathedral of Florence. After 1633 all his letters are dated “from my prison at Arcetri.” Not far from the Bellosguardo villa, but on the other slope of the hill, overlooking the lower valley of the Arno, stands the old Villa Montauto, once belonging to the Bonciani, who owned large possessions about there. In the tower of this villa Hawthorne wrote _Transformation_, and the peasants still remember the foreign gentleman who “sat like an owl up in the tower and refused to come down to talk to visitors.” He describes it accurately in the twenty-fourth chapter of his novel. “About thirty yards within the gateway rose a square tower, lofty enough to be a very prominent object in the landscape, and more than sufficiently massive in proportion to its height. Its antiquity was evidently such that, in a climate of more than abundant moisture, the ivy would have mantled it from head to foot in a garment that might by this time have been centuries old, though ever new. In the dry Italian air, however, Nature had only so far adopted this old pile of stonework as to cover almost every hand’s-breadth of it with close-clinging lichens and yellow moss; and the immemorial growth of these kindly productions rendered the general hue of the tower soft and venerable, and took away the aspect of nakedness which would have made its age drearier than now.