They looked as big and wicked as the pictures of the demon lover in our old ballad book, when he is sailing the faithless wife to hell! Of course I promised—and was a most unpopular person with the rest of the family at dinner-time the next night. But their boatman avenged me in the end. The day before we returned to Rome they took leave of him with a little present, and he, who had all along imagined them to be a young married couple, because they came unaccompanied, testified his gratitude and good-will in true Italian fashion, by crying enthusiastically: “Heaven bless you, my good Signori, and may it be _a fine boy_!” Annie put her head down and ran for home, and Erich was not allowed to come to dinner that night. Livorno is an anomaly, an Italian city with no history, no ancient monuments, no works of art. In fact, it always seemed to me less Italian than any spot I knew in the whole country, but in the days when we used to frequent it I took that, as one took everything else in that cheerful age, for granted, and it was only long afterwards that I gave myself the trouble to hunt up the causes of the phenomenon. Then I learnt that down to the days of the Medici it was a small fishing village with a few hundred inhabitants, bearing, for some unknown reason, the name of another tiny place further north, Livorno Vercellese. The Medici first noted its possibilities, and set to work to make it the real port of Florence, till then largely dependent for such a commodity on Pisa, a little further up the coast. Pisa, the ancient rival of Genoa and Venice, still sick with memories of her past greatness and, since 1405, the bought-and-paid-for fief of Florence, was always seething with disaffection and conspiracy. Its last desperate effort at retrieving its independence was made in 1494, and the Florentines were put to the trouble of besieging it and taking it by force. It was some sixty or seventy years later (I think during the reign of Francesco, the father of Marie de Medici) that Livorno recommended itself to the ruler of the Republic as a fine spot for a port that would have no disturbing memories of independence to interfere with its usefulness. In order to insure this they did not colonise it with Italians at all, but craftily invited the more commercially-minded among the malcontents of all Europe to come and open up trading houses there. The invitation was eagerly accepted: persecuted Catholics from England and Germany, Moors from Spain, Jews in great numbers from all parts came, settled, and flourished, the Jews of course outnumbering all the rest, so that the Leghorn population is largely Jewish to this day. But there are also several old English merchant houses that, while still affecting to regard England as “home,” are deeply rooted in the bright little city on the Ligurian Sea, and very kind and hospitable were their representatives to us. I remember certain commodities—great chests of tea, rolls of English