s."

"I should suggest," said the Senator to me, "that you make a note of
that. A little sentiment won't do us any harm--just a little. And they
_are_ like an old maid's pearls in connection with that middle-aged,
one-horse little city. Or I should say a widow's--Pisa was once a bride
of the sea. A grass widow's," improved the Senator. "It's all
meadow-land round there--did you notice?"

"I did not," I said coldly; "but, of course, if I'm to call Pisa a grass
widow, it will have to be. Although I warn you, poppa, that in case of
any critic being able to arise and indicate that it is laid out in
oyster beds, I shall make it plain that the responsibility is yours."

We were speeding through Tuscany, and the vine-garlanded trees in the
orchards clasped hands and danced along with us. The sky would have told
us we were in Italy if we had come on a magic carpet without a compass
or a time-table. Poppa says we are not, under any circumstances, to
mention it more than once, but that we might as well explode the fallacy
that there is anything like it in America. There isn't. Our cerulean is
very beautifully blue, but in Italy one discovers by contrast that it
is an intellectual blue, filled with light, high, provocative. The sky
that bends over Tuscany is the very soul of blue, deep, soft, intense,
impenetrable--the sky that one sees in those little casual bits of
landscape behind the shoulders of pre-Raphaelite Saints and Madonnas;
and here and there a lake, giving it back with delight, and now and then
the long slope of a hill, with an old yellow-walled town creeping up,
castle crowned, and raggedly trimmed with olives; and so many ruins that
the Senator, summoned by momma to look at the last in view, regarded it
with disparagement, which he did not attempt to conceal. He wondered, he
said, that the Italian Government wasn't ashamed of having such a lot of
them. They might be picturesque, but they weren't creditable; they gave
you the impression that the country was on the down grade. "You needn't
call my attention to any more of them, Augusta," he added; "but if you
see any building that looks like progress, now, anything that gives you
the idea of modern improvements inside, I shouldn't like to miss it."
And he returned to the thirty-second page of the Sunday _New York
World_.

"I sometimes wish," said momma, "that I were not the only person in this
family with the artistic temperament."

Sometimes we stopped at the li