On my departure from Florence, I luxuriated at Lucca, the bathing resort of the Tuscans. The city is old with stout walls around it. Three hours ride in a viturino will bring you to the baths. They are beautifully located, down in a valley with craggy and fertile mountains hanging over. It was quite a place in old times, and Counts, and Dukes and other nobles used to flock here to gamble, until so much murder was committed, Lucca broke up the resort of these monied men, and until very recently it was thought to be destroyed and dead, but the Austrians, who occupy all the important places in the government of this part of Italy, wishing to resurrect something that has already been in the Italians’ mind as a pleasant dream, hotels have been built, and livery stables erected, for the accommodation of the gay portion of Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Leghorn, and even Milan. On my way from Florence to Lucca I stopped at Pisa. Pisa is well known to the world as holding up one of the seven wonders of the world, to the world’s travelers and sight seers. I have reference to the “leaning tower.” In describing the “leaning tower,” I will merely say, that the first vast and solid layer of stone is heavy enough to hold all the others laid upon it. Each layer is fastened to the one under, and though it might protrude several feet on the layers protruding side, this few feet of reaching out stone can have no power over all the rest of that same layer around this immense tower. The next layer protrudes on the same perched side of the tower, and straight over the reaching edge of its under layer; as each layer is fastened with iron spikes to its under layer, there can be no chance of even the very top falling down on the side of the tower. It leans so much on each layer as to make the top of the tower reach away over the base on the leaning side, so much so that, were it to break loose, it would fall over to the earth without touching the base or foundation of the leaning side of the tower.

The City of Pisa is well known in Italian history, by the awful contentions that used to exist among next door neighbors. Men used to fight on the top of their own houses, and go on conquering, from house to house, until they would slay as many as twenty lords, whose ............