inside a very large nunnery; and let the
poor sisters walk never so much, neither they nor the passers-by could
see anything of each other. It was close upon the Acqua Sola, too; a
little park with still young but very pretty trees, and fresh and
cheerful fountains, which the Genoese made their Sunday promenade; and
underneath which was an archway with great public tanks, where, at all
ordinary times, washerwomen were washing away, thirty or forty together.
At Albaro they were worse off in this matter: the clothes there being
washed in a pond, beaten with gourds, and whitened with a preparation of
lime: "so that," he wrote to me (24th of August), "what between the
beating and the burning they fall into holes unexpectedly, and my white
trowsers, after six weeks' washing, would make very good fishing-nets.
It is such a serious damage that when we get into the Peschiere we mean
to wash at home."

Exactly a fortnight before this date, he had hired rooms in the
Peschiere from the first of the following October; and so ended the
house-hunting for his winter residence, that had taken him so often to
the city. The Peschiere was the largest palace in Genoa let on hire, and
had the advantage of standing on a height aloof from the town,
surrounded by its own gardens. The rooms taken had been occupied by an
English colonel, the remainder of whose term was let to Dickens for 500
francs a month (L20); and a few days after (20th of August) he described
to me a fellow tenant: "A Spanish duke has taken the room under me in
the Peschiere. The duchess was his mistress many years, and bore him (I
think) six daughters. He always promised her that if she gave birth to a
son, he would marry her; and when at last the boy arrived, he went into
her bedroom, saying--'Duchess, I am charmed to "salute you!"' And he
married her in good earnest, and legitimatized (as by the Spanish law he
could) all the other children." The beauty of the new abode will justify
a little description when he takes up his quarters there. One or two
incidents may be related, meanwhile, of the closing weeks of his
residence at Albaro.

In the middle of August he dined with the French consul-general, and
there will now be no impropriety in printing his agreeable sketch of the
dinner. "There was present, among other Genoese, the Marquis di Negri: a
very fat and much older Jerdan, with the same thickness of speech and
size of tongue. He was Byron's friend, keeps open house h