A relative, on whose estate we passed a part of the winter, remote from the city of Corfu, had tried to introduce improvements in the culture of his olives; but the laborers not only refused to coperate with him, but opposed the introduction of laborers who would lend themselves to his operations.

As the olives had been gathered in the days of Nausicaa they should be gathered still, and so should the oil be made, and he was obliged to yield.

But as we from the west suffer not a little from over-civilization and artifice, it is grateful to repose the eyes and the aesthetic sense in a land where there still remains something of the antique simplicity and picturesque uncouthness, and the winter in Scheria remains one of the grateful memories of a wandering life.
Leaving Corfu with freedom from any local obligations, and a keen enjoyment of the change from life in England, we decided to establish ourselves for a time in Florence, where we passed the whole of the summer.

In October a son was born to us, and we took a house and furnished it.

I took a studio, too, and returned to painting, as well as the long interval permitted me to gather up the threads of habit.
Art is not to be followed in that way, and there is no cause for surprise, nor, perhaps, for regret, that literature had the stronger hold on my mind; and that, between the "Times," letters for which were provoked by so many themes of interest to the English public, and archaeology, especially the study of the prehistoric monuments of central Italy, so important in their yet hardly determined relations to the classical world, the pencil found less attraction than the pen.
To my wife, whose enjoyment of Italian art was intense, Florence was an ideal residence; and on some accounts I still regret the circumstances which drove us out of the lily city,--to me still the most desirable residence I have ever known, when one is able to adapt one's self to the life there.