y, thus meeting the various needs
he felt: that for economy,--he was a family man with daughters to
clothe,--that for exercise,--his wife told him he was growing fat,--and
the need in general for an opportunity to think. He had found that
walking aided reflection, that walking in beautiful places started the
spring of apt and generous ideas. Though in his modest way a scholar, he
was not as yet an author, but Florence had inspired him with the desire
to write a book.

Just beyond the Roman Gate begins the long Viale dei Colli,--Avenue of
the Hills,--which climbs and winds, broad, shady, quiet, between lines
of gardens and villas, occupied largely by foreigners, to the Piazzale,
whence Michelangelo's boyish colossus gazes with a slight frown across
Florence, outspread at his feet. Mr. Foss, as he mounted the easy grade,
and noted with a liking unabated after years the pleasantness of each
habitation glimpsed through iron railings and embowering green, thought
how privileged a person should feel, after all, whose affairs involved
residence in Italy.

This recognized good fortune had not been properly tasted before another
aspect of the thing presented itself for consideration....

The consul felt a sigh trying to escape him, and turning from the images
whose obtrusion had called it up from the depths, directed his attention
to a different set of subjects, unwilling at the moment to be troubled.

The glories and iniquities of that great family whose cannon-balls--or
pills?--adorn so many of the 'scutcheons on Florentine street-corners
and palace-fronts are what he selected as the theme for his meditations,
a choice which seems less odd when we know that his book, the labor and
pleasure of his spare hours, was a study of the Medici.

He had not been busy many minutes with their supplanted policies and
extinct ambitions before these dropped back into the past whence he had
drawn them, and his mind gave itself over to an exercise more curious
than reconstructing a dead epoch. A shortish, stoutish man, with a
beginning of baldness on his crown and gray in his mustache, was trying
by the whole force of a sympathetic imagination to fit himself into the
shoes, occupy the very skin, of a delicate young girl, to look at the
world through her eyes and feel life with her pulses.

Thus absorbed, he hardly saw the posts of his own carriage gate; he
passed unnoticing between his flower-beds, up his stone steps and came
to himself