Peni had also his dumb companions, as his father had had before him. Tortoises lived at one end of the famous balcony at Casa Guidi; and when the family were at the Baths of Lucca, Mr. Browning would stow away little snakes in his bosom, and produce them for the child's amusement. As the child grew into a man, the love of animals which he had inherited became conspicuous in him; and it gave rise to many amusing and some pathetic little episodes of his artist life. The creatures which he gathered about him were generally, I think, more highly organized than those which elicited his father's peculiar tenderness; it was natural that he should exact more pictorial or more companionable qualities from them. But father and son concurred in the fondness for snakes, and in a singular predilection for owls; and they had not been long established in Warwick Crescent, when a bird of that family was domesticated there. We shall hear of it in a letter from Mr. Browning. Of his son's moral quality as quite a little child his father has told me pretty and very distinctive stories, but they would be out of place here.* * I am induced, on second thoughts, to subjoin one of these, for its testimony to the moral atmosphere into which the child had been born. He was sometimes allowed to play with a little boy not of his own class--perhaps the son of a 'contadino'. The child was unobjectionable, or neither Penini nor his parents would have endured the association; but the servants once thought themselves justified in treating him cavalierly, and Pen flew indignant to his mother, to complain of their behaviour. Mrs. Browning at once sought little Alessandro, with kind words and a large piece of cake; but this, in Pen's eyes, only aggravated the offence; it was a direct reflection on his visitor's quality. 'He doesn't tome for take,' he burst forth; 'he tomes because he is my friend.' How often, since I heard this first, have we repeated the words, 'he doesn't tome for take,' in half-serious definition of a disinterested person or act! They became a standing joke. Mrs. Browning seems now to have adopted the plan of writing independent letters to her sister-in-law; and those available for our purpose are especially interesting. The buoyancy of tone which has habitually marked her communications, but which failed during the winter in Rome, reasserts itself in the following extract. Her maternal comments on Peni and his perfections have hitherto been so carefully excluded, that a brief allusion to him may be allowed on the present occasion. 1857.