After the letter containing that announcement she wrote to me twice again, once from Oban and then after a long from Siena. The former was a scornfully minute description of the English at their holidays and how the conversation went among the women after dinner. "They are like a row of Japanese lanterns, all blown out long ago and swinging about in a wind," she wrote—an image that yet conveys something of the large, empty, unilluminating effect of a sort of social very . In the second letter she was concerned chiefly with the natural beauty of Italy and how latterly she had thrice wept at beautiful things, and what this mystery of beauty could be that had such power over her emotions.  
"All up the hillside before the window as I write the herbage is thick with <............