There is a busy unromantic seaport called Livorno, a long way up the coast from Naples, a Tuscan town of white streets and shadeless squares, all alive with commerce, and, until I came to years of reason, represented to me by the huge flapping straw hats, fine as silk and pale gold in colour, which we children regarded as signals of summer when, on the first hot day, the ribbons that held them were tied under our chins, and we were admonished, on pain of sunstrokes and spankings, not to take them off. I had among my possessions a toy Swiss cottage all made of the same pretty straw, and I imagined that “Leghorn” was a straw city with bunches of red poppies and blue ribbons on the house-tops for ornament. It was rather a blow to discover, on being taken there when I was seven years old, to find that the only traces of my toy city were the thin golden strings which most of the women were plaiting with lightning quickness as they walked in the streets or sat in the doorways. After that, as I grew older, Leghorn meant just the sea in some of its most enchanting aspects, for it was very rarely that we missed our few weeks of bathing there in September, if we had spent the summer in the North. It was the beginning of the autumn homecoming; we took an apartment on the long bright boulevard that faces the sea, the cook and one or two of the servants came up from Rome to look after us, and, always, we had a royally good time. The last, I think, was the best of all, happening after a memorable summer in the Bagni de Lucca, which I have described elsewhere. My sister had just become engaged, and her fiancé, Erich von Rabe, of course followed us to Leghorn. Hugh Fraser was there, occupied mostly, it seemed to me, in saving the Paget children from getting drowned, since they would attempt to follow their indomitable young mother in her long swims out in the deep. Lady Paget did everything beautifully; she was built like a goddess and could not do anything else, whether she rode or danced or glided about in great old rooms or flowery gardens; but she never seemed more of a goddess than when she stood for an instant in her clinging draperies with her arms above her head and then leapt, like a curved arrow, out and down into the sun-kissed waves. One held one’s breath while they engulfed her—and then, yards beyond, up came that proud small head, and away she would go, with long easy strokes, a being at one with the sun and the sea—a joy to behold.