Dear Aunt Nina,--Only a word in all the hurry of setting off. We love you as you love us, and are pretty nearly as happy as you would have us. All love and prosperity to dear Geddie, too; what do you say of 'Landor,' and my not sending it to Forster or somebody? _Che che_ (as the Tuscans exclaim), _who_ was it promised to call at my people's, who would have tendered it forthwith? I will see about it as it is. Goodbye, dearest aunt, and let no revolution disturb your good will to Ba and R.B. _To Miss Mitford_ Florence: August 24, 1848. Ever dearest Miss Mitford,--It's great comfort to have your letter; for as it came more lingeringly than usual, I had time to be a little anxious, and even my husband has confessed since that he thought what he would not say aloud for fear of paining me, as to the probability of your being less well than usual. Your letters come so regularly to the hour, you see, that when it strikes without them, we ask why. Thank God, you are better after all, and reviving in spirits, as I saw at the first glance before the words said it clearly.... As for ourselves, we have scarcely done so well, yet well; having enjoyed a great deal in spite of drawbacks. Murray, the traitor, sent us to Fano as a 'delightful summer residence for an English family,' and we found it uninhabitable from the heat, vegetation scorched with paleness, the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants sufficiently corroborative of their words, that no drop of rain or dew ever falls there during the summer. A 'circulating library' 'which doesn't give out books,' and 'a refined and intellectual Italian society' (I quote Murray for that phrase) which 'never reads a book through' (I quote Mrs. Wiseman, Dr. Wiseman's mother, who has lived in Fano seven years), complete the advantages of the place, yet the churches are beautiful, and a divine picture of Guercino's is worth going all that way to see.[180] By a happy accident we fell in with Mrs. Wiseman, who, having married her daughter to Count Gabrielli with ancestral possessions in Fano, has lived on there from year to year, in a state of permanent moaning as far as I could apprehend. She is a very intelligent and vivacious person, and having been used to the best French society, bears but ill this exile from the common civilities of life. I wish Dr. Wiseman, of whose childhood and manhood she spoke with touching pride, would ask her to minister to the domestic rites of his bishop's palace in Westminster; there would be no hesitation, I fancy, in her acceptance of the invitation. Agreeable as she and her daughter were, however, we fled from Fano after three days, and, finding ourselves cheated out of our dream of summer coolness, resolved on substituting for it what the Italians call 'un bel giro.' So we went to Ancona, a striking sea city, holding up against the brown rocks and elbowing out the purple tides, beautiful to look upon. An exfoliation of the rock itself, you