from eight till eleven in the Drainhams’ handsome drawing-room. On the evening in question the English colony at Pisa was very well represented in this modest assembly. There was Mr. and Mrs. St. John, accompanied by a gentle young English curate with pulmonary symptoms, who was staying with them, and giving the benefit of his services when he felt able for it. There was old Mr. Worsley and his pretty daughters, one of whom was suffering from bronchitis, and the other from _ennui_, the latter the more deadly malady of the two. The healthy portion of the population was rather in the background, and not held in much estimation. Mr. St. John himself, who now weighed nearly sixteen stone, had come to Pisa also with pulmonary symptoms, and was fond of citing himself as an instance of the cures effected by its wonderful equability of temperature. “But a winter in England would kill me still. I could never survive a winter in England,” he would say, tapping his ample bosom with his hand, and coughing to show that he had not quite lost the habit. On this particular occasion he uttered these words, which were very frequent on his lips, in order to console and encourage poor little Mrs. O’Carroll, the wife of a gigantic Irishman, who had broken all his bones one after another in riding across country, and who stood gaunt and tall in a corner conversing with the doctor, with red spots upon his high cheekbones, and a hollow circle round his big eyes, which did not promise such a comfortable termination. “Oh, then, and you’ll tell Harry,” said the anxious woman, with the mellow tones of her country. “You’ll tell him all about it, Mr. Singin, dear, and what you took, and how you lived?” “There is nothing to tell, my dear lady,” said the clergyman. “Pisa air, and a regular life, and taking care never to be out late or early, and nourishing food as much as I could take. But the air is the great thing. There is a serenity and equability in this Italian climate.” “Ah, then!” cried poor Mrs. O’Carroll, “to get him to take care is all the battle. He never was ill in his life, and he won’t allow he’s ill, not if I were to preach to him night and day.”