Katy had taken to calling her friend "Polly dear" of late,--a trick
picked up half unconsciously from Lieutenant Ned. Mrs. Ashe liked it;
it was sisterly and intimate, she said, and made her feel nearer
Katy's age.

"Does the tower really lean?" questioned Amy,--"far over, I mean, so
that we can see it?"

"We shall know to-morrow," replied Katy. "If it doesn't, I shall lose
all my confidence in human nature."

Katy's confidence in human nature was not doomed to be impaired. There
stood the famous tower, when they reached the Place del Duomo in Pisa,
next morning, looking all aslant, exactly as it does in the pictures and
the alabaster models, and seeming as if in another moment it must topple
over, from its own weight, upon their heads. Mrs. Ashe declared that it
was so unnatural that it made her flesh creep; and when she was coaxed
up the winding staircase to the top, she turned so giddy that they were
all thankful to get her safely down to firm ground again. She turned her
back upon the tower, as they crossed the grassy space to the majestic
old Cathedral, saying that if she thought about it any more, she should
become a disbeliever in the attraction of gravitation, which she had
always been told all respectable people _must_ believe in.

The guide showed them the lamp swinging by a long slender chain, before
which Galileo is said to have sat and pondered while he worked out his
theory of the pendulum. This lamp seemed a sort of own cousin to the
attraction of gravitation, and they gazed upon it with respect. Then
they went to the Baptistery to see Niccolo Pisano's magnificent pulpit
of creamy marble, a mass of sculpture supported on the backs of lions,