"But I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts, as to an old home. I lived with the divine human being, with his friends of the Falcon and the Basil, and my own not unworthy melancholy; and went about the flowery hills and lanes, solitary, indeed, and sick to the heart, but not unsustained. * * * My almost daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the cloister of the Doccia, and sat on the pretty melancholy platform behind it, reading, or looking through the pines down to Florence. In the valley of Ladies, I found some English trees,--trees not vine and olive,--and even a bit of meadow; and these, while I made them furnish me with a bit of my old home in the north, did no injury to the memory of Boccaccio, who is of all countries, and finds his home wherever we do ourselves, in love, in the grave, in a desert island." In the twenty-third article of the Wishing Cap, Mr. Hunt gives us this further description of Fiesole and the valley of Ladies:-- "Milton and Galileo give a glory to Fiesole beyond even its starry antiquity; nor perhaps is there a name eminent in the best annals of Florence, to which some connections can not be traced with this favored spot. When it was full of wood, it must have been eminently beautiful. It is at present, indeed, full of vines and olives, but this is not wood _woody_: not arboraceous, and properly sylvan. A few poplars and forest trees mark out the course of the Affrico; and the convent ground contrived to retain a good slice of evergreens, which make a handsome contrast on the hillside with its white cloister. But agriculture, quarries, and wood-fires have destroyed the rest. Nevertheless, I now found the whole valley beautiful. It is sprinkled with white cottages; the cornfields presented agreeable paths, leading among vines and fig-trees; and I discovered even a meadow; a positive English meadow, with the hay cut, and adorned with English trees. In a grassy lane, betwixt the corn, sat a fair rustic, receiving the homage of three young fellows of her acquaintance. In the time of Boccaccio, the Affrico formed a little crystal lake, in which (the said lake behaving itself, and being properly sequestered) the ladies of his company, one day, bathe themselves. The gentlemen, being informed of it, follow their example in the afternoon; and the next day the whole party dine, take their _siesta_ under the trees, and recount their novels. This lake has now disappeared before the husbandman, as if it were a fairy thing, of which a money-getting age was unworthy. Part of the Affrico is also closed up from the passenger by private grounds; but the rest of it runs as clearly as it did; and under the convent, a remnant of the woodier part of the valley, a delicious remnant, is still existing. The stream jumps into it, as if with delight, and goes slipping down little banks. It is embowered with olives and young chestnut-trees, and looks up to the