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a grandpapa.
They were both most welcome.
The only thing I do not like in what I hear about you, or what you tell me of yourself, is your recent persecution by headaches.
Pray be careful.
They were diminishing, I am glad to know, at the last dates.
But the brain is an important part of many people,—by no means of all, though all may be under the delusion that it is,—and to nobody is it of more importance than to such as you. . . . . Besides, I cannot afford to have anything untoward happen to you; it interferes too much with my selfishness and my private well-being.
I have attended to your little commissions with great pleasure, and shall have equal pleasure in attending to any others you may give me. I am not only in such cases working for a friend, but for myself and for a multitude of outside barbarians . . . .
We left Rome about the middle of March, after having passed a pleasanter winter there than any I have ever passed in Europe. . . . . A fortnight in Naples was much less satisfactory.
The city itself is anything but agreeable; but the excursions are charming, and the Museo Borbonico, containing in numberless rooms the spoils of Herculaneum and Pompeii, could be agreeably visited daily for almost any length of time, going occasionally to see the spots from which its treasures came.
Another fortnight divided between Sorrento and drives to Amalfi, Salerno, Paestum, etc., was delicious; especially eight quiet days spent in the full burst of spring at Sorrento, with the most beautiful bay in the world before our windows, Vesuvius in front, and the Mediterranean washing the foundations of the terrace on which our parlor opened.
The mornings that we passed in the orange groves there, where the trees were in luxuriant fruit, and the afternoons we gave to going on donkeys over the precipitous hills, and once to boating on the still waters, we shall never forget.
Those gardens, Hesperian fables true,—if true, there only,—where the ladies sketched, and ate the delicious fruit as it fell from the trees,—left nothing to desire.
Next after Rome, we have undoubtedly regretted Sorrento.
But enough of this.
Thank Susan for all her kindness to Lizzie, of which Lizzie has written often, and thank her for the kind thoughts she sends us about one so dear to us, and which we value from her as we should from few. You see I write in haste, by my manuscript.
I have no more such leisure as I had in Rome, dear old Rome; but such as I have, leisure and everything else, I give unto you.
G. T.
