with her lover, who is a courier; and the _padrona_, who is young
and pretty, and has only been married a few months to our elderly
landlord, has a story also. I forget some of the details; but there
was a stern parent and an admirer, and a cup of cold poison, and now
she says she wishes she were dying of consumption like poor
Alphonsine. For all that, she looks quite fat and rosy, and I often
see her in her best gown with a great deal of Roman scarf and mosaic
jewelry, stationed in the doorway, 'making the Pension look
attractive to the passers-by.' So she has a sense of duty, though
she is unhappy.

"Amy has buried all her pebbles, and says she is tired of playing
fairy. She is now sitting with her head on my shoulder, and
professedly studying her French verb for to-morrow, but in reality,
I am sorry to say, she is conversing with me about be-headings,--a
subject which, since her visit to the Tower, has exercised a
horrible fascination over her mind. 'Do people die right away?' she
asks. 'Don't they feel one minute, and doesn't it feel awfully?'
There is a good deal of blood, she supposes, because there was so
much straw laid about the block in the picture of Lady Jane Gray's
execution, which enlivened our walls in Paris. On the whole, I am
rather glad that a fat little white dog has come waddling down the
beach and taken off her attention.

"Speaking of Paris seems to renew the sense of fog which we had
there. Oh, how enchanting sunshine is after weeks of gloom! I shall
never forget how the Mediterranean looked when we saw it first,--all
blue, and such a lovely color. There ought, according to Morse's
Atlas, to have been a big red letter T on the water about where we
were, but I didn't see any. Perhaps they letter it so far out from