gins
to reveal the secrets of the delicious blue mountains that circle
around into the west, for its light discovers, uncovers, & exposes a
white snowstorm of villas & cities that you cannot train yourself to
have confidence in, they appear & disappear so mysteriously, as if
they might not be villas & cities at all, but the ghosts of perished
ones of the remote & dim Etruscan times; & late in the afternoon the
sun sets down behind those mountains somewhere, at no particular
time & at no particular place, so far as I can see.

Again at the end of March he wrote:

Now that we have lived in this house four and a half months my
prejudices have fallen away one by one & the place has become very
homelike to me. Under certain conditions I should like to go on
living in it indefinitely. I should wish the Countess to move out
of Italy, out of Europe, out of the planet. I should want her
bonded to retire to her place in the next world & inform me which of
the two it was, so that I could arrange for my own hereafter.

Complications with their landlady had begun early, and in time, next
to Mrs. Clemens's health, to which it bore such an intimate and vital
relation, the indifference of the Countess Massiglia to their needs
became the supreme and absorbing concern of life at the villa, and led
to continued and almost continuous house-hunting.

Days when the weather permitted, Clemens drove over the hills looking
for a villa which he could lease or buy--one with conveniences and just
the right elevation and surroundings. There were plenty of villas;
but some of them were badly situated as to altitude or view; some were
falling to decay, and the search was rather a discouraging one. Still
it was not abandoned, and the reports of these excursions furnished new
interest and new hope always to the invalid at home.

"Even if we find it," he wrote Howells, "I am afraid it will be months
before we can move Mrs. Clemens. Of course it will. But it comforts us
to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep
hope alive in her."

She had her bad days and her good days, days when it was believed she
had passed the turning-point and was traveling the way to recovery; but
the good days were always a little less hopeful, the bad days a little
more discouraging. On February 22d Clemens wrote in his note-book:

At midnight Livy's pulse went to 192 & there was a col