A. D. TO POLLY
Monte Catini,
September.
Charlton and I made an excursion to Lucca the other day and quite a success it proved. Off we drove in the early morning, with pheasant feathers and jangling bells on our horses, trotting by the trellised vineyards, the vines wreathing between trees of mulberry, and the great bunches of grapes beginning to grow purple, past brakes of cane, between the walls of villas, up and over bridges where the rivers run higher than the country, banked up by the levees, on through the plain. In the distance rose the hills, deep blue behind and pale blue in ranges beyond. We met the country people coming from the fair at Borgo Buggiano—the greatest cattle market in Tuscany—driving beautiful white and brindled cows. Soon we came to the town itself and rattled along its flag-paved streets, making a great noise with cracking whip and warning cries, and the contadini crowded up against the wall and stopped their business to watch us as we passed the gay booths with displays of many colored, mottled, glazed earthen ware, set forth, perilously near our wheels.
Then out into the country again, and on across flat green meadows from which rise the ancient walls of Lucca with shaded avenues of sycamores. We walked on the ramparts after luncheon and visited the gallery of the Palazzo Ducale with its good Fra Bartolomeos, and the cathedral filled with tinsel votive offerings of all kinds, and paper flowers. There were preparations for a pilgrimage which is to adore the Holy Image, a wooden likeness of the Saviour which Saint Somebody rescued in Palestine once on a time and placed in a ship without oar or rudder and set adrift. So the ship floated, miraculously directed by Providence, to the shores of Italy, and wonderment came over the people who saw the vessel mysteriously cruising up and down. They tried to catch it, but it fled from them until one Archbishop of Lucca, awakened from a warning dream, went out to find it. And the moment the boat saw the aforesaid archpriest upon the shore it sailed confidingly up to him and delivered its sacred image, which so came to Lucca. This is quite like the House of the Virgin at Loreto which was brought by a flight of angels through the air to that town—to be a fruitful source of income, for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims visit the place each year.
P. S. How I should like to run up to Paris, but the Ambassador would not approve of my having leave again. I am more disappointed than you can know, but I still hope to see you in America before long—am returning to Rome.
A. D. TO POLLY
Rome,