I wish they would settle in Rome instead of Florence, the life is so much more interesting here. Florence is charming, but asleep--here there is life, and the contrast between the old patrician city full of old-world memories and prejudices, and the political, financial atmosphere of this 19th century is most striking. W. has decided to go to Naples for four or five days. I shan't go with him. He will be all day in the museums, as there is a great deal to see, and I should bore myself sitting alone in the hotel. If we could stay long enough to make some excursions--see Sorrento, Capri, and Ischia, I would not hesitate, I should love to see it all again. They say Vesuvius is giving signs of a disturbance. As we were talking about Capri and Vesuvius I told them my experience there so many years ago, and both gentlemen told me I ought to write it while it was still fresh in my memory, so here it is and you will send the letter to the family in America. We went to Naples in October, 1867. Father died at Frascati the 27th of September, and we all needed change after the long nursing and watching. All our friends in Rome were most anxious we should get off; affairs were rapidly coming to a crisis in Italy and it was evident that the days of the temporal power of the Pope were numbered. At any moment the Italians under Garibaldi might appear at the gates of Rome and it was not considered safe for women and foreigners to remain there. No one thought or talked of anything else, and though we were absorbed by father's illness and the numerous duties that a sick room entails we were quite as excited as all our friends. Of course we heard the two sides--the liberals who had high hopes of liberty and "Italia Unita" and the "papalini" who were convinced that the Italians would only enter Rome over the bodies of the faithful. Our young imaginations pictured anything, everything; the Garibaldians penetrating quite to the Court of the Vatican, the Swiss Guard, Charette and his Zouaves, massacred; priests flying in every direction pursued by a crowd of soldiers and infuriated populace. Good old Dr. Valery, who knew his countrymen better than we did, assured us there was no danger. When resistance was perfectly useless it would be wicked to shed blood, and Pio Nono himself would be the first to advise submission to the inevitable. We couldn't believe that such a tremendous change and uprooting of the traditions of centuries could be accomplished so quietly. We stayed two days only in Rome after leaving Frascati. We laid father at rest in the little English churchyard just by the San Paolo gate. There was a mortuary chapel where he could stay till he was taken home to the old family churchyard at Jamaica where Grandpapa King and a long line of children and grandchildren are buried. We had to see about our mourning and were finally hustled out of Rome the third day, Mr. Hooker (the American banker), our great friend, fairly standing over us while the trunks were