pressed and uneasy, poor darling, and
looked at things from the blackest point of view. Nevertheless, I have
escaped some bad symptoms. No spitting of blood, for instance, no loss
of voice, and scarcely a threatening of pain in the side. Also I have
not grown thinner than is natural under the circumstances. At Genoa
(after our cold journey[45]) I _wasted_ in a few days, and thought much
worse of myself than there was reason to do this time.

I can assure you I am now much restored. The cough is decidedly got
under, and teases me, for the most part, only in the early morning; the
fever is gone, and the nights are quiet. I am able to take animal food
again, and shall soon recover my ordinary strength. Certainly it has
been a bad attack, and I never suffered anything like it in Italy
before. The illness at Genoa was the mere _tail_ of what began in
England, and was increased by the Alpine exposure. Our weather has been
very severe--wind and frost together--something peculiarly irritating in
the air. I am loth to blame my poor Florence, who never treated me so
before (and how many winters we have spent here!)--and our friends write
from Pisa that the weather was as trying there, while from Rome the
account is simply 'detestable weather.' At Naples it is sometimes
furiously cold; there's no perfect climate anywhere, that's certain. You
have only to choose the least evil. Here for the last week it has been
so mild that, if I had been in my usual state of health, I might have
gone out, they say; and, of course, I have felt the influence
beneficially. One encourages oneself in Italy when it is cold, with the
assurance that it can't last. Our misfortune this time has been that it
has lasted unusually long. How the Italians manage without fires I
cannot make out. So chilly as they are, too, it's a riddle.

You would wonder almost how I could feel the cold in these two rooms
opening into each other, and from which I have not stirred since the
cold weather began. Robert has kept up the fire in our bedroom
throughout the night. Oh, he has been spoiling me so. If it had not been
that I feared much to hurt him in having him so disturbed and worried,
it would have been a very subtle luxury to me, this being ill and
feeling myself dear. Do not set me down as too selfish. May God bless
him!...

Robert has been frantic about the Crimea, and 'being disgraced in the
face of Europe,' &c. &c. When he is mild he wishes the ministry to be
to