There are some gray Sunday afternoons of a
depressing effect on the spirit which requires no positive or palpable
reason.
In any case it was a relief to go from the shadow of the past there
through the pleasant city streets to the gentle quiet of the British
cemetery, where so many of our race and some even of our own nation are
taking their long rest. No one is now buried there, and the place, in
the gradual diminution of the English colony at Leghorn, has fallen into
a lovely and appealing neglect if not oblivion. Oblivion quite covers
its origin, but it is almost as old as Protestantism itself, and, if the
ground for it was the gift of the grand-duke who tolerated heretics as
well as Jews in the impulse he gave to the city's growth, it would not
be strange. The beautiful porch of the English church, for once Greek
and not Gothic, fronts upon it, but the dwindling congregation has no
care of it, and there is no fund to keep it so much as free from weeds
and brambles and the insidious ivy rending its monuments asunder.
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