The grasping courier galloped past us again; but we now regarded him and his _bidet_ with indifference. The olive soon appeared, a meager, formal, insignificant tree in a landscape, with a pale and stinted leaf, making altogether a miserable substitute for the apple, though an evergreen. Still one looks at it with pleasure; as one does also at the orange, the pomegranate, the fig, the date, and other trees of Oriental associations, though none but the fig has much beauty. Even the supper of the previous night, though saturated with oil, savoured of Italy, and was so much the more agreeable than the lame imitations of French cookery we had met with previously. Having asked one of my servants how they fared in the mess of old Caspar, she laughed and told me that ever since we had left Berne, the postillions and domestics, out of the large towns, had fared better than the masters; this little attention to the cast of _voituriers_ being a tribute to their power. On this hint, I had the curiosity to visit their table, and I found the statement literally true. Old Caspar laughed heartily at the exposure, and altogether the whole party, which included the domestics of two or three other travellers, appeared to think it a capital joke. What renders the palpable conspiracy more absurd, is the fact that the servants figure in the bills for the merest trifles,--at a franc or thirty sous a meal, I believe. On my remarking that the people of the house had made a mistake apparently, having served both us and them with the wrong breakfast, the whole party, my own people included, burst out in a fit of merriment, that showed how much they enjoyed the blunder. “_Ce sont des grands coquins, ces aubergistes monsieur_,” observed Caspar, by way of apology. At length we reached a descent that communicated, by a gorge, with the valley of the Arno. Soon after the city of Florence appeared, seated on a plain, at the foot of hills, with the dome of its cathedral starting out of the field of roofs, like a balloon about to ascend. We crossed a part of the plain, between groves of olives and mulberries, went beneath a sort of triumphal arch, erected, I believe, in commemoration of the completion of the great road that we had just been travelling, and entered the gate of the city. A few pauls were given to the custom-house officers, and the carriage rolled freely along the broad flat stones, with which all the towns of Tuscany are paved, the gutter being in the centre of the street. We proceeded to the Hotel York, a house which is so called from the cardinal of that name, took rooms and unloaded the _fourgon_ for the first time since quitting Berne.