_Montemiro Ligure, June 29, 1873._

I take immediate advantage of the generous offer of your Excellency
(allow an old Republican who has held you on his knees to address you
by that title sometimes, 'tis so appropriate) to help our poor people.
I never expected to come a-begging so soon. For the olive crop has been
unusually plenteous. We semi-Genoese don't pick the olives unripe, like
our Tuscan neighbors, but let them grow big and black, when the young
fellows go into the trees with long reeds and shake them down on the
grass for the women to collect--a pretty sight which your Excellency
must see some day: the grey trees with the brown, barefoot lads
craning, balanced in the branches, and the turquoise sea as background
just beneath.... That sea of ours--it is all along of it that I wish to
ask for money. Looking up from my desk, I see the sea through the
window, deep below and beyond the olive woods, bluish-green in the
sunshine and veined with violet under the cloud-bars, like one of your
Ravenna mosaics spread out as pavement for the world: a wicked sea,
wicked in its loveliness, wickeder than your grey northern ones, and
from which must have arisen in times gone by (when Phoenicians or
Greeks built the temples at Lerici and Porto Venere) a baleful goddess
of beauty, a Venus Verticordia, but in the bad sense of the word,
overwhelming men's lives in sudden darkness like that squall of last
week.

To come to the point. I want you, dear Lady Evelyn, to promise me some
money, a great deal of money, as much as would buy you a little mannish
cloth frock--for the complete bringing-up, until years of discretion,
of a young stranger whom the sea has laid upon our shore. Our people,
kind as they are, are very poor, and overburdened with children;