We were all but run to ground, you see.

Happily it didn't end so; and here we are in a very nice sunny apartment, which would have been far beyond our means last year or any year except just now when the Pope's obstinacy and the rumoured departure of the French have left Rome a solitude and called it peace--very problematical peace.

(Peni, in despair at leaving Florence, urged on us that 'for mama to have cold air in her chest would be better than to have a cannon-ball in her stomach'; but she was unreasonably more afraid of one than of the other.) Apartments here for which friends of ours paid forty pounds English the month last winter are going for fifteen or under--or rather not going--for nobody scarcely comes to take them.

The Pope's 'reforms' seem to be limited, in spite of his alarming position, which is breaking his heart, he told a friend of Mrs.Stowe's the other day, and out of which he looks to be relieved only by some special miracle (the American was quite affected to hear the old man bewail himself!), to an edict against crinolines, the same being forbidden to sweep the sacred pavement of St.
Peter's.

This is _true_, though it sounds like a joke.
Even Florence has very few English.