Judged by our own experiences, these people are but scantily welcomed amongst us. They are constantly associated in our minds with intolerable hurdy-gurdies and execrable barrel-organs. They are the nightmare of invalids, and the terror of all studious heads, and yet the wealth with which they return shows that their gifts are both acknowledged and rewarded. It must be that to many the organ-man is a pleasant visitor, and the image-hawker a vendor of "high art" I have seen a great many of them since we came here, and in their homes too; for mamma has taken up the notion that these excellent people are all living in a state of spiritual darkness and destitution, and to enlighten them has been disseminating her precious little volume on the Miracles of Mount Orsaro. It is plain to me that all this zeal of a woman of a foreign nation seems to them a far more miraculous manifestation than anything in her little book, and they stare and wonder at her in a way that plainly shows a compassionate distrust of her sanity. It is right I should say that Lord George thinks all these people knaves and vagabonds; and James says they are a set of smugglers, and live by contraband. Whatever be the true side of the picture, I must now leave to your own acuteness, or rather to your prejudices, which for all present purposes are quite good enough judges to decide. Papa likes this place so much that he actually proposed passing the winter here, for "cheapness,"--a very horrid thought, but which, fortunately, Lord George averted by a private hint to the landlord of the inn, saying that papa was rolling in wealth, but an awful miser; so that when the bill made its appearance, with everything charged double, papa's indignation turned to a perfect hatred of the town and all in it: the consequence is that we are tomorrow to leave for Florence, which, if but one half of what Lord George says be true, must be a real earthly paradise. Not that I can possibly doubt him, for he has lived there two, or, I believe, three winters,--knows everybody and everything. How I long to see the Cascini, the Court Balls, the Private Theatricals, at Prince Polywkowsky's, the picnics at Fiesole, and those dear receptions at Madame della Montanare's, where, as Lord G. says, every one goes, and "there's no absurd cant heard about character."