calculate on what may be? My head goes round to think of it. And papa, who _will_ keep going into that horrible city! Even if my sisters and brothers should go into the country as every year, he will be left, he is no more movable than St. Paul's. My sister-in-law will probably not come to us as soon as she intended, through a consideration for her father, who ought not, Robert thinks, to stay alone in the midst of such contingencies, so perhaps we may go to seek her ourselves in the spring, if she does not seek us out before in Italy. God keep us all, and near to one another. Love runs dreadful risks in the world. Yet Love is, how much the best thing in the world? We have had a great event in our house. Baby has cut a tooth.... His little happy laugh is always ringing through the rooms. He is afraid of nobody or nothing in the world, and was in fits of ecstasy at the tossing of the horse's head, when he rode on Wilson's knee five or six miles the other day to a village in the mountains--screaming for joy, she said. He is not six months yet by a fortnight! His father loves him; passionately, and the sentiment is reciprocated, I assure you. We have had the coolest of Italian summers at these Baths of Lucca, the thermometer at the hottest hour of the hottest day only at seventy-six, and generally at sixty-eight or seventy. The nights invariably cool. Now the freshness of the air is growing almost too fresh. I only hope we shall be able (for the cold) to keep our intention of staying here till the end of October, I have enjoyed it so entirely, and shall be so sorry to break off this happy silence into the Austrian drums at poor Florence. And then we want to see the vintage. Some grapes are ripe already, but it is not vintage time. We have every kind of good fruit, great water-melons, which with both arms I can scarcely carry, at twopence halfpenny each, and figs and peaches cheap in proportion. And the place agrees with Baby, and has done good to my husband's spirits, though the only 'amusement' or distraction he has is looking at the mountains and climbing among the woods with me. Yes, we have been reading some French romances, 'Monte Cristo,' for instance, I for the second time--but I have liked it, to read it with him. That Dumas certainly has power; and to think of the scramble there was for his brains a year or two ago in Paris! For a man to write so much and so well together is a miracle. Do you mean that they have left off writing--those French writers--or that they have tired you out with writing that looks faint beside the rush of facts, as the range of French politics show those? Has not Eugène Sue been illustrating the passions? Somebody told me so. Do _you_ tell me how you like the French President, and whether he will ever, in your mind, sit on Napoleon's throne. It seems to me that he has given proof, as far as the evidence goes, of prudence, integrity, and conscientious