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underneath my window. It is now almost nine, and with the sunlight streaming into the room last night seems little more real than a bad dream—it suddenly occurs to me that the answers to all the mysteries I have so laboriously described may well be known by now. I shall therefore lay down my pen and go and seek them out, in hopes of concluding this letter in a more satisfactory fashion than with a mere series of question marks.

 
    Tuesday
    Has it ever happened to you, while going through old papers, to hit upon some youthful journal or memorandum, full of shallow certainties and easy courage? If so, you will be familiar with the mixture of contempt and pity which I now feel on scanning the above lines—the difference being that these were penned not six-and-thirty hours ago!
    Judge from this the intensity of the changes that have taken place in so short a time: truly I may say that most of the things I thought yesterday have been unceremoniously seized and stood on their heads, leaving my own in a state of utter bewilderment. Believe it or not, Prescott, I find myself in the extraordinary situation of aiding and abetting Mr Robert Browning in an attempt to pervert the course of justice!
    But this is not the way to set about it. ‘First things first’ must be my motto, if I am to make any sense of all.
    By Monday morning, then, as I mentioned, the storm had quite blown over, leaving a clear sky and crisp sunshot air—one of those splendid days, harbingers of spring, that make one feel like crying out aloud ‘The South! The South!’ Needless to say, I restrained any such impulse, but nevertheless my heart was high as I strode through the streets of Florence. Poor Isabel’s death seemed a distant memory, a horror of the night, and my grief had become almost an abstraction. Nature’s compensation for the loss of our loved ones is a renewed sense of our own vitality. ‘Alas, that she is gone!’ I sighed, and back came answer, ‘Rejoice, that you remain!’ At such a moment, on such a day, simply being alive is reason enough to exult; and I exulted.
    The streets of Florence are a spectacle of which one never tires, but that morning every scene produced an effect overwhelmingly rich and deep and full of life. The profusion of anecdote and incident which assails the eye here may be partly explained by the way in which the aristocrat here lives cheek by jowl with the pauper, the merchant with the artisan. There is no ‘good’ quarter, with the result that you see more in the time it takes to stroll the length of one average street than you will in a week elsewhere; and all bizarrely juxtaposed with the greatest nonchalance: grave burghers in fur-lined capes discussing the real unpublished news of the city in discreet murmurs; a locksmith at work on a creaky old door; a brace of counterfeit Madonnas set out in the street, awaiting the framer’s art; a ringing laugh, a cutting jibe, a sullen retort; chickens being throttled, plucked and suspended on strings; a peasant woman carefully sprinkling water to freshen her horde of green vegetables; meat being hoisted in a basket on a rope towards an inaccessible window from which a face peers anxiously down; a distinguished-looking gentleman complaining loudly that the watch he has been sold keeps stopping dead at five to five every day; a priest scurrying along on some urgent mission of life or death; a soldier with a prisoner in guard; a girl with big grave eyes who leaves her work for a moment to watch you pass.
    And when at length you reach the river, and the huddling mediaeval walls fall back to reveal San Donato hill with the monastery, and the great reach of glinting water bridged by the quaint old Ponte Vecchio (which is apparently to be pulled down any day now) and the snow-capped mountains in the distance—well, to my unphilosophical eye it all seems a quite sufficient justification in itself for the existence of the world.
    Once beyond the river, however, this mood