From the _loggia_ at Careggi, where we used to spend a great part of our evenings, watching the lights which starred the city, inhaling the perfumes of the orange flowers, and delighting in the erratic flights of those embodied stars, the fire-flies, we commanded the windows of the Villa Quarto, inhabited by our Swedish friend, the Comtesse Pipa and her nephew, Eric Baker, with whom we had invented a code of signals, and by displaying some scarlet or yellow drapery, understood at once if an invitation to dinner was refused or accepted. [Sidenote: “BALLET D’ACTION”] On the opposite side, but at a greater distance, stood the Villa Salviati, inhabited by a beautiful countrywoman of ours, Mrs Vansittart before-mentioned, the tall and stately chatelaine of that magnificent house afterwards purchased by Mario and Grisi, and which, I believe, still bears the name of the former. Many delightful evenings were spent beneath Mrs Vansittart’s roof, where Charles and I were frequent guests. I remember once when he and I had done our best to amuse our hosts with a _ballet d’action_ on a small scale, at the conclusion of which I was nearly smothered by the profusion of flowers which were lavished upon me from that fertile garden. Oh yes, and I remember only too vividly the homeward walk with that beloved companion, across a short cut, all hedged and fringed with cypress and ilex, glistening and sparkling in the silver radiance of a Tuscan moonlight. That was an eventful period in the lives of both, for, during that summer Charles’s destiny became entwined with that of a young English lady whose acquaintance he had made the previous winter at Rome, and who with her widowed mother was a constant visitor at the Villa Careggi. Indeed, before the end of the summer, my dear brother was engaged to be married to Miss Moore, the daughter of General Sir Lorenzo Moore, late Governor of the Ionian Islands, in commemoration of which office he had bestowed on his daughter the somewhat strange though musical name of Zacyntha. The lovers were separated for the winter, but on their return to England, in the year 1849, they were united, and my brother gained a devoted and faithful wife, even to his life’s end, and she became the mother of a large family of noble and beautiful children. During our stay at Careggi we kept open house. Numerous friends and acquaintances, _en route_ for Florence or Rome, flocked from all parts to find a hearty welcome from the English occupants of that historical palace, so intimately bound up with memories of the palmy days of Florence and her merchant princes; while the neighbours from the villas before-mentioned often frequented our charming gardens of an evening. Amongst our visitors was Prince Anatole Demidoff (so well known in Florence as one of the chief leaders of society), afterwards the husband of Princess Mathilde, the sister of Prince Napoleon, who gave splendid receptions at his own villa of San Donato.