Lander's affairs threatened to detain the Brownings in Florence longer than they desired, now that peace had come and it was not indispensable to run out of doors twice a day in order to inspect the bulletins. But after three weeks of very exhausting illness, Mrs Browning needed change of air. As soon as her strength allowed, she was lifted into a carriage and they journeyed, as in the year 1850, to the neighbourhood of Siena. She reached the villa which had been engaged by Story's aid, with the sense of "a peculiar frailty of being." Though confined to the house, the fresher air by day and the night winds gradually revived her strength and spirits. The silence and repose were "heavenly things" to her: the "pretty dimpled ground covered by low vineyards" rested her eyes and her mind; and for excitements, instead of reports of battle-fields there were slow-fading scarlet sunsets over purple hills. A kind Prussian physician, Gresonowsky, who had attended Mrs Browning in Florence, and who entered sympathetically into her political feelings, followed her uninvited to Siena and gave her the benefit of his care, declining all recompense. The good friends from America, the Storys, were not far off, and Landor, after a visit to Story, was placed in occupation of rooms not a stone's-cast from their villa. With Pen it was a time of rejoicing, for his father had bought the boy a Sardinian pony of the colour of his curls, and he was to be seen galloping through the lanes "like Puck," to use Browning's comparison, on a dragon-fly's back.[77]