out of me. Yesterday, in pure
determination to get the better of it, I walked twelve miles in
mountain rain. You never saw it rain. Scotland and America are nothing
to it." But now all this was over. "The weather changed on Saturday
night, and has been glorious ever since. I am afraid to say more in its
favour, lest it should change again." It did not. I think there were no
more complainings. I heard now of autumn days with the mountain wind
lovely, enjoyable, exquisite past expression. I heard of mountain walks
behind the Peschiere, most beautiful and fresh, among which, and along
the beds of dry rivers and torrents, he could "pelt away," in any dress,
without encountering a soul but the contadini. I heard of his starting
off one day after finishing work, "fifteen miles to dinner--oh my stars!
at such an inn!!!" On another day, of a party to dinner at their
pleasant little banker's at Quinto six miles off, to which, while the
ladies drove, he was able "to walk in the sun of the middle of the day
and to walk home again at night." On another, of an expedition up the
mountain on mules. And on another of a memorable tavern-dinner with
their merchant friend Mr. Curry, in which there were such successions of
surprising dishes of genuine native cookery that they took two hours in
the serving, but of the component parts of not one of which was he able
to form the remotest conception: the site of the tavern being on the
city wall, its name in Italian sounding very romantic and meaning "the
Whistle," and its bill of fare kept for an experiment to which, before
another month should be over, he dared and challenged my cookery in
Lincoln's-inn.

A visit from him to London was to be expected almost immediately! That
all remonstrance would be idle, under the restless excitement his work
had awakened, I well knew. It was not merely the wish he had, natural
enough, to see the last proofs and the woodcuts before the day of
publication, which he could not otherwise do; but it was the stronger
and more eager wish, before that final launch, to have a vivider sense
than letters could give him of the effect of what he had been doing. "If
I come, I shall put up at Cuttris's" (then the Piazza-hotel in
Covent-garden) "that I may be close to you. Don't say to anybody, except
our immediate friends, that I am coming. Then I shall not be bothered.
If I should preserve my present fierce writing humour, in any pass I may
run to Venice, Bologna, and