ssus, please. I want them for my fishpond stream
rather than for the bee-house one. The fishpond stream is very
doleful, and wants to dance with daffodils if they would come and
teach it. How happy we are in our native streams. A thunder-storm
swelled the Tiber yesterday, and it rolled over its mill weirs in
heaps, literally, of tossed water, the size of haycocks, but black
brown like coffee with the grounds in it, mixed with a very little
yellow milk. In some lights the foam flew like cast handfuls of heavy
gravel. The chief flowers here are only broom and bindweed, and I
begin to weary for my heather and for my Susie; but oh dear, the ways
are long and the days few.

* * * * *

LUCCA, _29th July_ (1874).

I'm not going to be devoured when I come, by anybody, unless _you_
like to. I shall come to your window with the birds, to be fed myself.

And please at present always complain to me whenever you like. It is
the over boisterous cheerfulness of common people that hurts me; your
sadness is a help to me.

You shall have whatever name you like for your book provided you
continue to like it after thinking over it long enough. You will not
like "Gleanings," because you know one only gleans refuse--dropped
ears--that other people don't care for. _You_ go into the garden and
gather with choice the flowers you like best. That is not gleaning!

* * * * *

LUCCA, _10th August_ (1874).

I have been grieved not to write to you; but the number of things that
vex me are so great just now, that unless by false effort I could
write you nothing nice. It is very dreadful to live in Italy, and more
dreadful to see one's England and one's English friends, all but a
field or two, and a stream or two, and a one Susie and one Dr. Brown,
fast becoming like Italy and the Italians.

I have too _much sympathy_ with your sorrow to write to you of it.
What I have not sympathy with, is your hope; and how cruel it is to
say this! But I am driven more and more to think there is to be no
more good for a time, but a reign of terror of men and the elements
alike; and yet it is so like what is foretold before the coming of the
Son of man that perhaps in the extremest evil of it I may some day
read the sign that our redemption draws nigh.

Now, Susie, invent a nice cluster of titles for the book and send them
to me to choose