CHAPTER VIII.
In those days--_temporibus illis_, as the historians of long-forgotten centuries say--there used to be a very general exodus of the English colony at Florence to the baths of Lucca during the summer months.
Almost all Italians, who can in anywise afford to do so, leave the great cities nowadays for the seaside, even as those do who have preceded them in the path of modern luxurious living.

But at the time of which I am writing the Florentines who did so were few, and almost confined to that inner circle of the fashionable world which partly lived with foreigners, and had adopted in many respects their modes and habits.

Those Italians, however, who did leave their Florence homes in the summer, went almost all of them to Leghorn.

The baths of Lucca were an especially and almost exclusively English resort.
It was possible to induce the _vetturini_ who supplied carriages and horses for the purpose, to do the journey to the baths in one day, but it was a very long day, and it was necessary to get fresh horses at Lucca.

There was no good sleeping-place between Florence and Lucca--nor indeed is there such now--and the journey from the capital of Tuscany to that of the little Duchy of Lucca, now done by rail in less than two hours, was quite enough for a _vetturino's_ pair of horses.