ASSISI, _17th June_ (1874).
I have been having a bad time lately, and have no heart to write to
you. Very difficult and melancholy work, deciphering what remains of a
great painter[9] among stains of ruin and blotches of repair, of five
hundred years' gathering. It makes me sadder than idleness, which is
saying much.
I was greatly flattered and petted by a saying in one of your last
letters, about the difficulty I had in unpacking my mind. That is
true; one of my chief troubles at present is with the quantity of
things I want to say at once. But you don't know how I find things I
laid by carefully in it, all moldy and moth-eaten when I take them
out; and what a lot of mending and airing they need, and what a
wearisome and bothering business it is compared to the early
packing,--one used to be so proud to get things into the corners
neatly!
I have been failing in my drawings, too, and I'm in a horrible inn
kept by a Garibaldian bandit; and the various sorts of disgusting
dishes sent up to look like a dinner, and to be charged for, are a
daily increasing horror and amazement to me. They succeed in getting
_everything_ bad; no exertion, no invention, could produce such
badness, I believe, anywhere else. The hills are covered for leagues
with olive trees, and the oil's bad; there are no such lovely cattle
elsewhere in the world, and the butter's bad; half the country people
are shepherds, but there's no mutton; half the old women walk about
with a pig tied to their waists, but there's no pork; the vine grows
wild anywhere, and the wine would make my teeth drop out of my head if
I took a glass of it; there are no strawberries, no oranges, no
melons, the cherries are as hard as their stones, the beans only good
for horses, or Jack and the beanstalk, and this is the size of the
biggest asparagus--
[Illustration: hand-drawn sketch of asparagus stalk]
I live here in a narrow street ten feet wide only, winding up a hill,
and it was full this morning of sheep as close as they could pack, at
least a thousand, as far as the eye could reach,--tinkle tinkle, bleat
bleat, for a quarter of an hour.
[Footnote 9: Cimabue.]
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