when Mrs. Browning was ill. But the abbot could not break the
rules in regard to women, and after five days they had to return to
Florence. Browning used to play the organ in the chapel, as, it is
said, Milton had done two centuries earlier.

At such a height and with only a short season the hotel proprietors
must do what they can, and prices do not rule low. A departing American
was eyeing his bill with a rueful glance as we were leaving. "Milton
had it wrong," he said to me (with the freemasonry of the plucked,
for I knew him not), "what he meant was, 'thick as thieves'."

We returned by way of Sant' Ellero, the gallant horses trotting
steadily down the hill, and then beside the Arno once more all the
way to Florence. It chanced to be a great day in the city--September
20th, the anniversary of the final defeat of papal temporal power,
in 1870--which we were not sorry to have missed, the first tidings
coming to us from the beautiful tower of the Palazzo Vecchio which
in honour of the occasion had been picked out with fairy lamps.

Among the excursions which I think ought to be made if one is in
Florence for a justifying length of time is a visit to Prato. This
ancient town one should see for several things: for its age and for
its walls; for its great piazza (with a pile of vividly dyed yarn
in the midst) surrounded by arches under which coppersmiths hammer
all day at shining rotund vessels, while their wives plait straw;
for Filippino Lippi's exquisite Madonna in a little mural shrine at
the narrow end of the piazza, which a woman (fetched by a crowd of
ragged boys) will unlock for threepence; and for the cathedral, with
Filippino's dissolute father's frescoes in it, the Salome being one
of the most interesting pre-Botticelli scenes in Italian art. If only
it had its colour what a wonder of lightness and beauty this still
would be! But probably most people are attracted to Prato chiefly by
Donatello and Michelozzo's outdoor pulpit, the frieze of which is a
kind of prentice work for the famous cantoria in the museum of the
cathedral at Florence, with just such wanton boys dancing round it.

On Good Friday evening in the lovely dying April light I paid
thirty centimes to be taken by tram to Grassina to see the famous
procession of the Gesu Morto. The number of people on the same
errand having thrown out the tram service, we had very long waits,
while the road was thronged with other vehicles; and the result was
I w