_To Miss Mitford_

Casa Tolomei, Alia Villa, Bagni di Lucca:
August 20 and 21, 1853.

... We are enjoying the mountains here, riding the donkeys in the
footsteps of the sheep, and eating strawberries and milk by basins full.
The strawberries succeed one another, generation after generation,
throughout the summer, through growing on different aspects of the
hills. If a tree is felled in the forests strawberries spring up just as
mushrooms might, and the peasants sell them for just nothing. Our little
Penini is wild with happiness; he asks in his prayers that God would
'mate him dood and tate him on a dontey,' (make him good and take him on
a donkey), so resuming all aspiration for spiritual and worldly
prosperity. Then our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Story, help the mountains to
please us a good deal. He is the son of Judge Story, the biographer of
his father, and, for himself, sculptor and poet; and she a sympathetic,
graceful woman, fresh and innocent in face and thought. We go backwards
and forwards to tea and talk at one another's houses. Last night they
were our visitors, and your name came in among the Household Gods to
make us as agreeable as might be. We were considering your expectations
about Mr. Hawthorne. 'All right,' says Mr. Story, '_except the rare half
hours_' (of eloquence). He represents Mr. Hawthorne as not silent only
by shyness, but by nature and inaptitude. He is a man, it seems, who
talks wholly and exclusively with the pen, and who does not open out
socially with his most intimate friends any more than with strangers. It
isn't his _way_ to converse. That has been a characteristic of some men
of genius before him, you know, but you will be nevertheless
disappointed, very surely. Also, Mr. Story does not imagine that you