we got nearer and nearer to the place, I wished the whole gallery
in the crater of Vesuvius. To mend the matter, it was a stormy
dismal evening when we, at last, approached that part of the
Riviera. It thundered; and the thunder of my city and its
environs, rolling among the high hills, is very loud. The lizards
ran in and out of the chinks in the broken stone wall of the
garden, as if they were frightened; the frogs bubbled and croaked
their loudest; the sea-wind moaned, and the wet trees dripped; and
the lightning - body of San Lorenzo, how it lightened!

We all know what an old palace in or near Genoa is - how time and
the sea air have blotted it - how the drapery painted on the outer
walls has peeled off in great flakes of plaster - how the lower
windows are darkened with rusty bars of iron - how the courtyard is
overgrown with grass - how the outer buildings are dilapidated -
how the whole pile seems devoted to ruin. Our palazzo was one of
the true kind. It had been shut up close for months. Months? -
years! - it had an earthy smell, like a tomb. The scent of the
orange trees on the broad back terrace, and of the lemons ripening
on the wall, and of some shrubs that grew around a broken fountain,
had got into the house somehow, and had never been able to get out
again. There was, in every room, an aged smell, grown faint with
confinement. It pined in all the cupboards and drawers. In the
little rooms of communication between great rooms, it was stifling.
If you turned a picture - to come back to the pictures - there it
still was, clinging to the wall behind the frame, like a sort of
bat.

The lattice-blinds were close shut, all over the house. There were
two ugly, grey old women in the house, to take care of it; one of