Lucca, as many readers will remember, enjoys among all the descriptive epithets popularly given to the different cities of Italy, that of _Lucca la industriosa_.
To us migratory English those singularly picturesque villages which capped all the hills, and were reached by curiously ancient paved mule paths zig-sagging up among the chesnut woods, seemed to have been created solely for artistic and picnic purposes.

The Saturnian nature of the life lived in them may be conceived from the information once given me by the inhabitants of one of these mountain settlements in reply to some inquiry about the time of day, that it was always noon there when the priest was ready for his dinner.
Such were the summer quarters of the English Florentine colony, _temporibus illis_.

There used to be, I remember, a somewhat amusingly distinctive character attributed, of course in a general way subject to exceptions, to the different groups of the English rusticating world, according to the selection of their quarters in either of the above three little settlements.

The "gay" world preferred the "Ponte," where the gaming-tables and ballrooms were.

The more strictly "proper" people went to live at the "Villa," where the English Church service was performed.