_Aug. 12th._ I wrote you last from Rome, I think--didn't I? but it was after that that I heard of your having had at the last awful delays and complications, awful _strike_-botherations, over your sailing. I knew nothing of them at the time.... I can only hope that the horrid memory of it has been brushed and blown away for you by the wind of your American kilometres. I remained in Rome--for myself--a goodish while after last writing you, and there were charming moments, faint reverberations of the old-time refrains--with a happy tendency of the superfluous, the incongruous crew to take its departure as the summer came on; yet I feel that I shouldn't care if I never saw the perverted place again, were it not for the memory of four or five adorable occasions--charming chances--enjoyed by the bounty of the Filippis.... My point is that they carried me in their wondrous car (he drove it himself all the way from Paris via Macerata, and with four or five more picked-up inmates!) first to two or three adorable Roman excursions--to Fiumicino, e.g., where we crossed the Tiber on a medieval raft and then had tea--out of a Piccadilly tea-basket--on the cool sea-sand, and for a divine day to Subiaco, the unutterable, where I had never been; and then, second down to Naples (where we spent two days) and back; going by the mountains (the valleys really) and Monte Cassino, and returning by the sea--i.e. by Gaeta, Terracina, the Pontine Marshes and the Castelli--quite an ineffable experience. This brought home to me with an intimacy and a penetration unprecedented how incomparably the old _coquine_ of an Italy is the most beautiful country in the world--of a beauty (and an interest and complexity of beauty) so far beyond any other that none other is worth talking about. The day we came down from Posilipo in the early June morning (getting out of Naples and round about by that end--the road from Capua on, coming, is archi-damnable) is a memory of splendour and style and heroic elegance I never shall lose--and never shall renew! No--you will come in for it and Cook will picture it up, bless him, repeatedly--but I have drunk and turned the glass upside down--or rather I have placed it under my heel and smashed it--and the Gipsy life _with_ it!--for ever. (Apropos of smashes, two or three days after we had crossed the level crossing of Caianello, near Caserta, seven Neapolitan "smarts" were _all_ killed dead--and this by no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a deviation, a _slip_, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant end. The Italian driving is _crapulous_, and the roads mostly not good enough.) But I mustn't expatiate. I wish I were younger. But for that matter the "State Line" would do me well enough this evening--for it's again the stroke of midnight. If it weren't I would tell you more. Yes, I wish I were to be seated with you to-morrow--catching the breeze-borne "burr" from under Cook's fine nose! How is Gross, dear woman, and how are Mitou and Nicette--whom I missed so at Monte Cassino? I spent four days--out from Florence--at Ned Boit's wondrous--really quite divine "eyrie" of Cernitoio, over against Vallombrosa, a dream of Tuscan loveliness and a really admirable séjour.... I spent at the last two divine weeks in Venice--at the Barbaro. I don't care, frankly, if I never see the vulgarized Rome or Florence again, but Venice never seemed to me more loveable--though the vaporetto rages. They keep their cars at Mestre! and I am devotedly yours both,