We were hot in the city of Florence. My only consolation was to eat unnumbered cherries and apricots, for I did not as yet like the figs. My brother and I sometimes had a lurid delight in cracking the cherry and apricot stones and devouring the bitter contents, with the dreadful expectation of soon dying from the effects. Altogether I considered our sojourn in the town house, Casa del Bello, a morose experience; but it was, fortunately, short. My mother had a different feeling: she wrote home to America, "It is a delightful residence." Without doubt it contained much engaging finery. Three parlors, giving upon a garden, were absorbed into the "study" for my father alone; and my mother was greatly pleased to find that fifteen easy-chairs were within reach of any whim for momentary rest between the campaigns of sight-seeing. To add to my own arbitrary shadow and regret of that time, the garden at the rear of the house was to me clamp; full of green things and gracefully drooping trees, doubtless, but never embracing a ray of sunshine. Yet it was hot; all was relaxing; summer prevailed in one of its ill-humored moods. To make matters worse, my brother had caught in this Dantesque garden a brown bird, whether because sick or lame I know not. But an imprisoned bird it certainly was; and its prison consisted of a small, cell-like room, bare of anything but the heart-broken glances of its occupant. My father objected to the capture and caging of birds, and looked with cold disapproval upon the hospitable endeavor of my brother to lengthen the existence of a little creature that was really safer in the hands of Dame Nature. Presently the bird from the sad garden died, and then indeed Florence became intolerable to me! I wandered through the long, darkish hall that penetrated our edifice from front to back, and I sometimes emerged into the garden's bosky sullenness in my unsmiling misery. Again my mother's testimony proves my mind to have been strangely influenced by what to her was a garden full of roses, jessamine, orange and lemon trees, and a large willow-tree drooping over a fountain in its midst, with a row of marble busts along a terrace: altogether a place that should have filled me with kittenish glee. The "Note-Books," to be sure, suggest that it harbored malaria. I looked with painful disappointment upon the unceasing dishes of fresh purple figs, which everybody else seemed to enjoy. I saw pale golden wine poured from poetic bottles braided with strands of straw, like pretty girls' heads of flaxen hair; and I was surprised that my father had the joyousness to smile, though sipping what he was later to call "Monte Beni Sunshine."