you mention the exceeding fine air there, and recommend the milk of that
place as very salutary in disorders of this nature. I beg you will give
directions to your people to receive him into your house, and to supply him
with what he shall have occasion for: which will not be much; for he is so
temperate as not only to abstain from delicacies, but even to deny himself
the necessaries his ill health requires. I shall supply him with all that
is needful for his journey. Farewell."

Now, on reaching Frejus on a balmy day in April, when the air was soft as
butter-milk, and the sun was hot, not scorching, my thoughts went at once
to poor Zosimus, with his hacking cough, his delicate complexion, come here
to inhale the soft air and drink the warm milk. And I thought of him the
more from certain experiences of my own relative to Como. I went to that
city in January from England, thinking that it lay in a warm nook, and
that there I might bask for a few weeks, when recovering from an attack of
bronchitis, till I was able to go further south.

I went into an hotel where I had stayed in summer and been comfortable;
but--oh!--never shall I forget the horrors of that hotel in January! I was
the sole person staying in it. There was no bedroom that had in it a stove.
In the _salle-a-manger_ the fire was lighted for half-an-hour at nine in
the morning, then let out and not rekindled through the day. The fountain
in the square was frozen. An icy wind descended from the Alps. My bedroom
was a tomb; brick-floored, stone vaulted. My bed measured two feet across,
and the sheet and crimson _duvet_ were so nicely adjusted as exactly to fit
the bed, when unoccupied. When I lay in the bed, that _duvet_ was balanced
like a logan stone on the ridge of my body shivering under it, and it
oscillated as I shivered. Then it slid gently to the floor, and left me
with a chill and damp linen sheet over me, the thermometer being below
zero, and I--afflicted with a cough.