Well! Cold and wet drove us out of Switzerland that first week in September, though, as it turned out, we should have had a fine rest of the month if we had stayed. We crossed the Simplon to Pallanza on Lake Maggiore, where we stayed ten days, till the bad fare made us sick; and then came straight to Florence by the 21st. As almost no strangers had arrived, we had the pick of all the furnished apartments, most of which threatened great bleakness or gloominess for the winter, with their high ceilings, and _some_ rooms in all of them lit from court or well. Our family seems to be of the maximum size for which apartments are made! We found but this one into all the rooms of which the sun can come either before- or after-noon. It is clean, and abundantly furnished with sofas and chairs, but not a "convenience for housekeeping" of any kind whatsoever. No oven in which to make the macaroni _au gratin_, no place to keep more than a week's supply of charcoal, or I fear more than three or four days' supply of wood for the fire when the cold weather comes, as come it will with a vengeance, from all accounts. I hope our children won't freeze! Harry and Billy started school at last two days ago, and glad I am to see them at it. In the immortal words of our townsman Rindge in his monumental inscription, "every man" (and "every" boy!) "should have an honest occupation."[101] What they need is comrades of their own age, and competitive play and work, rather than monuments of antiquity or landscape beauty. Animal, not vegetable or mineral life is their element. The school is English, they'll get no more French or German there than at Browne and Nichols's [school at home] and they'll have to begin Italian, I'm afraid, which will be pure interruption and leave not a rack behind after they've been home a year. Still one mustn't always grumble about one's children, and they are getting an amount of perception over here, and a freedom from prejudices about American things and ways, which will certainly be of general service to their intelligence, and be worth more to them hereafter than their year would have been if spent in drill for the Harvard exams--even if what they lose do amount to a whole year, which I much doubt. But I think it may be called certain that they shan't be kept abroad a _second_ year!