This is not the only music I get gratis. One of the narrow lanes separates my end of the house from the church of St. Illario and the dwelling of the priest. From the belvedere, which communicates with my own room, we have frequent passages of civility across the lane with the good old _curato_, who discusses the weather and the state of the crops with unction. The old man has some excellent figs, and our cook having discovered it, lays his trees under contribution. And here I will record what I conceive to be the very perfection of epicurism, or rather of taste, in the matter of eating. A single fresh fig, as a corrective after the soup, I hold to be one of those sublime touches of art, that are oftener discovered by accident, than by the investigations of knowledge. I do not mean that I have even the equivocal merit of this accidental discovery, for I was told the secret, and I believed French ingenuity had got pretty near it already, in the way of the melons. But no melon is like a fig; nor will a French fig, certainly not a Paris fig, answer the purpose at all. It must be such a fig as one gets in Italy. At Paris you are always offered a glass of Madeira after the soup, the only one taken at table; but it is a pitiful substitute for the fig. After communicating this improvement on human happiness, let me add that it is almost destructive of the pleasure derived from the first, to take a second. _One_ small, greencoated, fresh fig, is the precise point of gastronomic felicity in this respect. But the good _curato_, besides his figs, has a pair of uneasy bells in his church tower, which are exactly forty-three feet from my ears, and which invariably ring in pairs six or eight times daily. There are matins, noon-tide, angelus, vespers, and heaven knows what, regularly; to say nothing of extra-masses, christenings, funerals and weddings. The effect of the bells is often delightful when, heard in the distance, for they are ringing all over the valley and on the heights, morning, noon, and night; but these are too near. Still, I get, now and then, rare touches of the picturesque from this proximity to the church. The _contadini_ assemble in their costumes beneath my belvedere, and I have an excellent opportunity of overlooking, and overhearing them too. The _Lingua Toscana_ applies rather to the people of the towns than to the rural population, I fancy; for these worthy peasants speak a harsh _patois_. Walking in sight of the _duomo_, lately, with a gentleman of Florence, I desired him to put a question to a group of peasants; and I found that, while he was perfectly understood, he had great difficulty in understanding them. The aspirated words of Florence itself are well known to all who have been in Italy. We had a droll proof of this just before we left the town; for desiring my man to give our address to a shopkeeper, he gave, “Il Signor ----, _Hasa Rihasole, via del Hohomero_.”[3]