Ruskin.
_Don't_ get this letter, I say.

Your
E.B.B.

Robert's love, and _Penini's_. If 'Fanny' strikes you, 'Madame Bovary'
will thunder-strike you.

* * * * *

_To Miss Mitford_

43 Via di Leone, Rome: January 7, 18[54].

It is long, my ever dearest Miss Mitford, since I wrote to you last, but
since we came to Rome we have had troubles, out of the deep pit of which
I was unwilling to write to you, lest the shadows of it should cleave as
blots to my pen. Then one day followed another, and one day's work was
laid on another's shoulders. Well, we are all well, to begin with, and
have been well; our troubles came to us through sympathy entirely. A
most exquisite journey of eight days we had from Florence to Rome,
seeing the great monastery and triple church of Assisi and the wonderful
Terni by the way--that passion of the waters which makes the human heart
seem so still. In the highest spirits we entered Rome, Robert and Penini
singing actually; for the child was radiant and flushed with the
continual change of air and scene, and he had an excellent scheme about
'tissing the Pope's foot,' to prevent his taking away 'mine gun,'
somebody having told him that such dangerous weapons were not allowed by
the Roman police. You remember my telling you of our friends the
Storys--how they and their two children helped to make the summer go
pleasantly at the baths of Lucca? They had taken an apartment for us in
Rome, so that we arrived in comfort to lighted fires and lamps as if
coming home, and we had a glimpse of their smiling faces that evening.
In the morning, before breakfast, little Edith was brought over to us by
the manservant with a message--'The boy was in convulsions; there was
danger.' We hurried to the house, of course, leaving Edith with Wilson.
Too true! All that first day was spent beside a death-bed; for the child
never rallied, never opened his eyes in consciousness, and by eight in
the evening he was gone. In the meanwhile, Edith was taken ill at our
house--could not be moved, said the physicians. We had no room for her,
but a friend of the Storys on the floor immediately below--Mr. Page, the
artist--took her in and put her to bed. Gastric fever, with a tendency
to the brain, and within two days her life was almost despaired of;
exactly the same malady as her brother's. Also the English nurse was
apparently dying at the Storys' house, and Emma Page, the artist's
youngest d