bled a white rat, were about to drown it in the Grand Canal. She took it back to Florence with her, and christened it after the Queen of the Adriatic; "and thus," she added, "I hear Venezia, Venezia, all day long." Another member of the canine saved, a truly friendly fellow, was christened "Keeley, or the low comedian," from his singularly unaristocratic, not to say comic appearance. A highly unpopular member of her dog community was "Teddie," who snapped at the whole world except its dear mistress, and seemed to be of Conrad's opinion when addressing Medora, "I cease to love thee, when I love mankind." One year when she spent the hot summer months at the Bagni di Lucca, she made the entire journey at considerable expense, by vetturino, because the "Livorno-Empoli-Firenze" railway line would not allow her to have her dogs in the railway carriage with her; and her description of the journey in a private letter, written at the time, was humorously descriptive of the intelligent companionship she had chosen. It was her wish that, whenever she died, her dogs should be saved by an easy euthanasia from the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," which she felt sure would befall them in less considerate keeping.
Her habitual cheerfulness, that finest and most beneficent form of social charity, and which invariably beamed out from her at the sight of a human being, doubtless screened from the world at large, as it was only meet it should, the cloud of heavenly melancholy which, as any one who reads her poems attentively will perceive,
