"Yes, signer," she answered; and then we had some talk about the age and the beauty of the baby, which I declared wonderful for both, in praises loud enough for the father and mother to hear. After that they seemed to hold a family council, from which I thought it respectful to stand apart until the grandmother spoke to me again.

I did not understand, and I appealed to our guide for help.

"She wishes you to be godfather to the child."

I had never yet been a godfather, but I had the belief that it brought grave responsibilities, which in the very casual and impermanent circumstances I did not see how I was to meet. Yet how to refuse without wounding these kind people who had so honored me I did not know until a sudden inspiration came to my rescue.

"Tell them," I said, "and be careful to make them understand, that I am very grateful and very sorry, but that I am a Protestant, and that I suppose I cannot, for that reason, be godfather to their child."

He explained, and they received my thanks and regrets with smiling acquiescence; and just then a very stout little old priest (who has baptized nearly all the babies in Pisa for fifty years) came in, and the baptism proceeded without my intervention. But I remained, somehow, disappointed; it would have been pleasant to leave a godchild behind me there in the neighborhood of Pisa; to have sent him from time to time some little remembrance of this remote America, and, perhaps, when he grew up and came to Pisa, and learned the art of the statuary, to have had from him a Leaning Tower which he had cut in alabaster for me. I was taking it for granted he was a boy, but he may not have been; there is always that chance.

If I had been alone, I suppose I should still have gone into the Campo Santo, from mere force of habit; I always go, in Pisa, but I had now with me clearer eyes for art than mine are, and I wished to have their light on the great allegories and histories frescoed round the cloisters, and test with them the objects of my tacit and explicit reserves and misgivings. I needed such eyes, and even some such powerful glasses as would have pierced through the faded and wasted pictures and shown them at least as I had first seen them. They were then in such reasonable disrepair as one might expect after three or four centuries, but in the last thirty years a ruinous waste has set in before which not only the colors have faded, but the surfaces have crumbled under the colors; and as yet no man knows how to stop the ravage. I think I have read that it is caused by a germ; but, if not, the loss is the same, and until a parasite for the germ is found the loss must go on, and the work of Giotto, of Benozzo Gozzoli, of Memmi, must perish with that of the Orgagnas, which may indeed go, for all me. Bible stories, miracles, allegories—they are all hasting to decay, and it can be but a few years until they shall vanish like the splendors of the dawn which they typify in art.

In some things the ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just as the hell of Christian doctrine is not the hell it used to be. Death and the world are indeed immitigable; the corpses in their coffins are as terrifying to the gay lords and ladies who come suddenly upon them as ever they were, though doubtless of no more lasting effect with such sinners than they would be nowadays. But what one must chiefly lament is the waste of the whole quaint and charming series of Scripture incidents by Benozzo Gozzoli. This is indeed most lamentable, and after realizing the loss one is only a little heartened by the gayety of certain grieving widows, sitting in marble for monuments to their husbands at several points under the arcades. What cheer they might have brought us was impaired by the sight of the sarcophaguses and the other antiques against the walls, which inflicted an inappeasable ache for the city where such things abound, and brought our refluent Romesickness back full tide upon us. More than once Pisa elsewhere did us the like involuntary unkindness; she, too, is yellow and mellow like Rome, and she had moments of the Piazza Navona and the Piazza di Spagna which were poignant. But she had moments of her own when Rome could not rival her—such, for instance, as that when she invited us from the perishing frescos of her Campo Santo to turn our eyes on the flower-strewn field of death which the cloisters surrounded, and where in the hallowed earth which her galleys brought from Jerusalem her children, in their several turns, used to sleep so sweetly and safely.

The afternoon sunlight was prolonging the day there as well as it could, and we should have liked to linger with it as late as it would, but there were other places in Pisa calling us, and we must go. We found our driver, and his black-eyed boy beside him on the box, waiting for us at the cathedral door, and we seem to have left it pretty much to them where we should go. They decided us, if we really left it to them, mainly for the outside of things, so that we might see as much of Pisa as possible; but it appears to have been their notion that we ought to visit, at least, the inside of the Church of the Knights of St. Stephen. I do not know whether I protested or not that I had abundantly seen this already, but, at any rate, I am now glad that they took us there. As every traveller will pretend to remember, the main business of the knights was to fight the Barbary pirates, and the main business of their church is now to serve as a repository of the prows of the galleys and the flags which they took in their battles with the infidels. There are other monuments of their valor, but by all odds the flags will be the most interesting to the American visitor, because of the start that many of them will give him by their resemblance to our own banner, with their red-and-white stripes, which the eye follows in vivid expectation of finding the blue field of stars in the upper left-hand corner. It never does find this, and that is the sufficient reason for holding to the theory that our flag was copied from the armorial bearings of the Washington family, and not taken from the standard of those paynim corsairs; but there is poignant instant when one trembles.

We viewed, of course, the exterior of the edifice standing on the site of the Tower of Famine, where the cruel archbishop starved the Count Ugolino and his grandchildren to death; and we drove by the buildings of Pisa's famous university, which we afterward fancied rather pervaded the city with the young and ardent life of its students. It is no great architectural presence, but there are churches and palaces to make up for that. Everywhere you chance on them in the narrow streets and the ample piazzas, but the palaces follow mostly the stately curve of the Arno, where some of them have condescended to the office of hotels, and where, I believe, one might live in economy and comfort; or, at any rate, I should like to try. It would get rather warm there in May, and July and August are not to be thought of, but all the other year it would be divine, with such a prospect as can hardly be matched anywhere else. Pisa used once to be the resort of many seeking health or warmth, and for mere climate it ought again to come into favor. Probably there is reasonably accessible society there, and, as the Livornese believe, there is at least excellent opera. The time might grow long, but ought not to be very heavy, and there is a cafe, at the very finest point of the curve, where you can get an excellent cup of tea. Whether this attests the resort or sojourn of many English, or the growth of the tea-habit among the Pisans, I cannot say, but that cafe is very charming, with students standing about in it and admiring the ladies who come in to buy pastry, and who do not suppose there is any one there to look at them. I am sure that the handsome mother with the pretty daughter who lingered so long over their choice of little cakes could not have imagined any one was looking, or she would at once have taken macaroons and hurried away: at that cafe they have macaroons almost three inches across, and delicious.



The whole keeping was so pleasant that we hated to leave it to the lengthening shadows from the other shore, but we were to drive down the Arno into the promenade that follows it, I do not know how far; with the foolish greed of travel, we wanted to get in all of Pisa that we could, even if we tore ourselves from its most tempting morsel. But it was all joy, and I should like, at this moment, to be starting on that enchanting drive again. I leave the reader to imagine the lovely scenery for himself; almost any of my many backgrounds will serve; but I will supply him with a piece of statistics such as does not fall in everybody's way. We noted the great number of anglers who lined the opposite bank, with no appearance of catching anything, and I asked our driver if they never happened to get a bite. "Not in the daytime," he explained, compassionately, "but as soon as the evening comes they get all the fish they want."

I could pour out on the reader many other Pisan statistics, but they would be at second-hand. After long vicissitude, the city is again almost as prosperous as she was in the heyday of her national greatness, when she had commerce with every Levantine and Oriental port. We ourselves saw a silk factory pouring forth a tide of pretty girls from their work at the end of the day; there was no ruin or disrepair noticeable anywhere, and the whole city was as clean as Rome, with streets paved with broad, smooth flagstones where you never missed the rubber tires which your carriage failed of. But Pisa had a great air of resting, of taking life easily after a tumultuous existence in the long past which she had put behind her. Throughout the Middle Ages she was always fighting foreign foes without her walls or domestic factions within, now the Saracens wherever she could find them or they could find her, now the Normans in Naples, now the Cor-sicans and Sardinians, now Lucca, now Genoa, now Florence, and now all three. Her wars with these republics were really incessant; they were not so much wars as battles in one long war, with a peace occasionally made during the five or ten or fifteen years, which was no better than a truce. When she fell under the Medici, together with her enemy Florence, she shared the death-quiet the tyrants brought that prepotent republic, and it was the Medicean strength probably which saved her from Lucca and Genoa, though it left them to continue republics down to the nineteenth century. She was at one time an oligarchy, and at another a democracy, and at another the liege of this prince or that priest, but she was never out of trouble as long as she possessed independence or the shadow of it. In the safe hold of united Italy she now sits by her Arno and draws long, deep breaths, which you may almost hear as you pass; and I hope the prospect of increasing prosperity will not tempt her to work too hard. It does not look as if it would.

We were getting a little anxious, but not very anxious, for that one cannot be in Pisa, about our train back to Leghorn; though we did not wish to go, we did not wish to be left; but our driver reassured us, and would not let us shirk the duty of seeing the house where Galileo was born. We found it in a long street on the thither side of the river, and in such a poor quarter that our driver could himself afford to live only a few doors from it. As if they had expected him to pass about this time, his wife and his five children were sitting at his door and playing before it. He proudly pointed them out with his whip, and one of the little ones followed on foot far enough to levy tribute. They were sufficiently comely children, but blond, whereas the boy on the box was both black-eyed and black-haired. When we required an explanation of the mystery, the father easily solved it; this boy was the child of his first wife. If there were other details, I have forgotten them, but we made our romance to the effect that the boy, to whose beautiful eyes we now imputed a lurking sadness, was not happy with his step-mother, and that he took refuge from her on the box with his father. They seemed very good comrades; the boy had shared with his father the small cakes we had given him at the cafe. At the station, in recognition of his hapless lot, I gave him half a franc. By that time his father was radiant from the small extortion I had suffered him to practice with me, and he bade the boy thank me, which he did so charmingly that I almost, but not quite, gave him another half-franc. Now I am sorry I did not. Pisa was worth it.



IX. BACK AT GENOA

There is an old saying, probably as old as Genoa's first loot of her step-sister republic, "If you want to see Pisa, you must go to Genoa," which may have obscurely governed us in our purpose of stopping there on our way up out of Italy. We could not have too much of Pisa, as apparently the Genoese could not; but before our journey ended I decided that they would have thought twice before plundering Pisa if they had been forced to make their forays by means of the present railroad connection between the two cities. At least there would have been but one of the many wars of murder and rapine between the republics, and that would have been the first. After a single experience of the eighty tunnels on that line, with the perpetually recurring necessity of putting down and putting up the car-window, no army would have repeated the invasion; and, though we might now be without that satirical old saying, mankind would, on the whole, have been the gainer. As it was, the enemies could luxuriously go and come in their galleys and enjoy the fresh sea-breezes both ways, instead of stifling in the dark and gasping for breath as they came into the light, while their train ran in and out under the serried peaks that form the Mediterranean shore. I myself wished to take a galley from Leghorn, or even a small steamer, but I was overruled by less hardy but more obdurate spirits, and so we took the Florentine express at Pisa, where we changed cars.

The Italian government had providently arranged that the car we changed into should be standing beyond the station in the dash of an unexpected shower, and that it should be provided with steps so high and steep, with Italian ladies standing all over them and sticking their umbrellas into the faces of American citizens trying to get in after them, that it was a feat of something like mountain-climbing to reach the corridor, and then of daring-do to secure a compartment. Though a collectivist, with a firm belief in the government ownership of railroads everywhere, I might have been tempted at times in Italy to abjure my creed if I had not always reflected that the state there had just come into possession of the roads, with all their capitalistic faults of management and outwear of equipment which it would doubtless soon reform and repair. I venture to suggest now, however, that its prime duty is to have platforms level with the car-doors, as they are in England, and not to let Italian ladies stand in the doorways with their umbrellas. I do not insist that it shall impose silence and sobriety upon a party of young French people in the next compartment, but I do think it should remove those mountains back from the sea so that the trains carrying cultivated Americans can run along the open shore the whole way to Genoa. Pending this, it should provide strong and watchful employees to lower and raise the windows at the mouth of each of the eighty tunnels in every car. I do not demand that it shall change the site of the station in Genoa so that it shall not always be the city's whole length away from the hotel you have chosen, but I think this would be a desirable improvement, especially if it is after dark when you arrive and raining a peculiarly cold, disagreeable rain.

That rain was very disappointing; for, in the intervals between tunnels, we had fancied, from the few brief glimpses we caught of the landscape, that the April so backward elsewhere in Italy was forwarder in the blossomed trees along the eastern Riviera; and we learned at our hotel that the steam-heat had just been taken off because the day had been so hot and dry, though the evening was now so cold and wet. It was fitfully put on and off during the chilly week that ensued, though in our fifth-story garden, to which we sometimes resorted, there was a mildness in the air that was absent in-doors. The hotel itself was disappointing; any hotel would be after our hotel in Leghorn; and, though there was the good-will of former days, there was not the former effect. The corridors crashed and clattered all day long and well into the night with the gayety of some cheap incursion of German tourists, who seemed, indeed, to fill the whole city with their clamor. They were given a long table to themselves, and when they were set at it and began to ply their knives and tongues the din was deafening. That would not have been so bad if they had not been so plain, or if, when they happened, in a young girl or two, to be pretty, they had not guttled and guzzled so like the plainest of their number. One such pretty girl was really beautiful, with a bloom perhaps already too rich, which, as she abandoned herself to her meat and drink, reddened downward over her lily neck and upward to her golden hair, past the brows under which her blue, blue eyes protruded painfully, all in a frightful prophecy of what she would be when the bud of her spring should be the full-blown cabbage-rose of her summer.

I dare say those people were not typical of their civilization. Probably modern enterprise makes travel easy to sorts and conditions of Germans who once would not have dreamed of leaving home, and now tempts these rude Teutonic hordes over or under the Alps and pours them out on the Peninsula, far out-deluging the once-prevalent Anglo-Saxons. The first night there was an Englishman at dinner, but he vanished after breakfast; the next day an Italian officer was at lunch, but he came no more; we were the only Americans, and now we had the sole society of those German tourists. Perhaps it was national vanity, but I could not at the moment think of an equal number of our fellow-citizens of any condition who would not have been less molestively happy. One forgot what one was eating, and left the table bruised as if physically beaten upon by those sound-waves and sight-waves. But our companions must have made themselves acceptable to the city they had come to visit; Genoa is very noisy, and they could not be heard above the trams and omnibuses, and in the streets they could not be seen at table; when I ventured to note to a sacristan, here and there, that there seemed to be a great many Germans in town, the fact apparently roused nothing of the old-time Italian antipathy for the Tedeschi. Severally they may have been cultivated and interesting people; and that blooming maiden may really have been the Blue Flower of Romance that she looked before she began to dine.



We were entering upon our third view of Genoa with the zest of our first, and I was glad to find there were so many things I had left unseen or had forgotten. First of all the Campo Santo allured me, and I went at once to verify the impressions of former years in a tram following the bed of a torrential river which was now dry except in the pools where the laundresses were at work, picturesquely as always in Italy. But here they were not alone the worthy theme of art; their husbands and fathers, and perhaps even their fiances, were at work with them, not, indeed, washing the linen, but spreading to dry it in snowy spaces over the clean gravel. On either bank of the stream newly finished or partly finished apartment-houses testified to the prosperity of the city, which seemed to be growing everywhere, and it would not be too bold to imagine this a favorite quarter because of its convenience to the Cam-po Santo. Already in the early forenoon our train was carrying people to that popular resort, who seemed to be intending to spend the day there. Some had wreaths and flowers, and were clearly sorrowing friends of the dead; others, with their guide-books, were as plainly mere sight-seers, and these were Italians as well as strangers, gratifying what seems the universal passion for cemeteries. In our own villages the graveyards are the favorite Sunday haunt of the young people and the scene of their love-making; and it has been the complaint of English visitors to our cities that the first thing their hosts took them to see was the cemetery. They did not realize that this was often the thing best worth showing them, for our feeble aesthetic instincts found their first expression in the attempt to dignify or beautify the homes of the dead. Each mourner grieved in marble as fitly as he knew how, and, if there was sometimes a rivalry in vaults and shafts, the effect was of a collective interest which all could feel. Sometimes it was touching, sometimes it was revolting; and in Italy it is not otherwise. The Campo Santo of San Miniato at Florence, the Campo Santo at Bologna, the Campo Santo wherever else you find it, you find of one quality with the Campo Santo at Genoa. It makes you the helpless confidant of family pride, of bruised and lacerated love, of fond aspiration, of religious longing, of striving faith, of foolish vanity and vulgar pretence, but, if the traveller would read the local civilization aright, he cannot do better than go to study it there.

My third experience of the Genoese Campo Santo was different only in quantity from the first and second. There seemed more of the things, better and worse, but the increasing witness was of the art which rendered the fact with unsparing realism, sometimes alloyed with allegory and sometimes not, but always outright, literal, strong, rank. The hundreds of groups, reliefs, statues, busts; the long aisles where the dead are sealed in the tableted shelves of the wall, like the dead in the catacombs, the ample space of open ground enclosed by the cloisters and set thick with white crosses, are all dominated by a colossal Christ which, in my fancy, remains of very significant effect. It is as if no presence less mighty and impressive could centre in itself the multitudinous passions, wills, and hopes expressed in those incongruous monuments and reduce them to that unity of meaning which one cannot deny them.



The Campo Santo of Genoa is a mortuary gloss of Genoese history: of the long succession of civic strifes and foreign wars common to all the Italian republics, now pacified at last by a spirit of unity, of brotherhood. At Genoa, more than anywhere else in Italy except Milan, you are aware of the North—its strenuousness, its enterprise, its restless outstretching for worlds beyond itself. Columbus came with the gift of a New World in his hand, and, in the fulness of time, Mazzini came with the gift of a Newer World in his hand: the realization of Christ in the ideal of duties without which the old ideal of rights is heathen and helpless. Against the rude force of Genoa, the aristocratic beauty of such a place as Pisa was nothing; only Florence and Venice might vie with her. But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it; her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice, the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant, impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first made her elective chief magistrate Doge for life, and then for two years; under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802, when, after having accepted the French notion of freedom from Bonaparte, she enjoyed a lion's share of his vicissitudes. For a hundred years before that the warring powers had fought over her in their various quarrels about successions, and she ought to have been well inured to suffering when, in 1800, the English and the Austrians besieged her French garrison, and twenty thousand of her people starved in a cause not their own. The English restored the Doges, and the Republic of Genoa fell at last nineteen years after the Republic of Venice and three hundred years after the Republic of Florence. She was given to Piedmont in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, and she has formed part of Italy ever since the unification. I believe that now she is of rather radical opinions in politics, though the bookseller who found on his shelves a last copy of the interesting sketch of Genoese history which I have profited by so little, said that the Genoese had been disappointed in the Socialists, lately in power, and were now voting Clerical by a large majority.

The fact may have been colored by the book-seller's feelings. If the Clericals are in superior force, the clerics are not: nowhere in Italy did I see so few priests. All other orders of people throng the narrow, noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and wheels beats to the topmost stories of the palaces towering overhead in their stony grandiosity. Everywhere in the structures dating after the Gothic period there is want of sensibility; the art of the Renaissance was not moulded here in the moods of a refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in Venice tempered it to beauty; but it renders in marble the prepotence of a commercialized nobility, and makes good in that form the right of the city to be called Genoa the Proud. Perhaps she would not wish to be called proud because of these palaces alone. It is imaginable that she would like the stranger to remember the magnificence with which she rewarded the patriotism of her greatest citizen after Columbus and Mazzini: that mighty admiral, Andrea Doria, who freed this country first from the rule of Charles V. and then from the rule of Francis I.; who swept the Barbary corsairs from the seas; who beat the Turks in battles on ship and on shore; who took Corsica from the French when he was eighty-eight years old; who suffered from civil faction; who outlived exile as he had outlived war, and who died at the age of ninety-four, after he had refused the sovereignty of the country he had served so long; who was the Washington of his day, and was equally statesman and soldier, and, above all, patriot. It is his portrait that you see in that old palace (called the Palace of the Prince because Charles V. had called him Prince) overlooking the port, where he sits an old, old man, very weary, in the sole society of his sarcastic cat, as I have noted before. The cat seems to have just passed some ironical reflection on the vanity of human things and to be studying him for the effect. Both appear indifferent to the spectator, but perhaps they are not, and you must not for all that fail of a visit to the Church of San Matteo, set round with the palaces of the Doria family—the palace which his grateful country gave the Admiral after he refused to be her master, and the palaces of his kindred neighboring it round.

I do not remember any equal space in all Europe which, through a very little knowledge, so takes the heart as the gentle little church founded by an earlier Doria, and, after four hundred years, restored by a later, and then environed with the stately homes of the race, where they could be domesticated in the honor and reverence of their countrymen because of the goodness and greatness of the loftiest of their line. It is such a place as one may revere and yet possess one's soul in self-respect, very much as one may revere Mount Vernon. The church, as well as the piazza, is full of Dorian memories, and the cloister must be visited not only for its rather damp beauty, but for the full meaning of the irony which Doria's cat in the portrait wished to convey: against the wall here are gathered the fragments of the statue of Doria which, when the French Revolution came to Genoa, the patriots threw out of the ducal palace and broke in the street below.

We were some time in finding our way into the magnificent hall of the Great Council where this statue once stood, with the statues of many other Genoese heroes and statesmen, and I am not sure that it was worth all our trouble. Magnificent it certainly was, but coarsely magnificent, like so much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Municipality, I should not think it too much. There in the great hall are the monuments of those Genoese notables whose munificence their country wished to remember in the order of their generosity. I do not remember just what the maximum was, but the Doge or other leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five thousand ducats to the state had a statue erected to him; one who gave fifteen, a bust; and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The surprising thing is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good likenesses or not, are delightful art: it is as if the noble acts of the benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to reproduce them not only in true character, but in due dignity. To the American who views them and remembers that we have now so much money that some of us do not know what to do with it, they will suggest that our millionaires have an unrivalled opportunity of immortality in the same sort. There is hardly a town of ten thousand inhabitants in the country where there are not men who could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or fifty, or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a new life in bronze or marble. This would enrich us beyond the dreams of avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would give work to hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing to do, and would revive or create the supplementary industries of casting in metal or carving in stone.

The time was in Genoa, it seems, as the time is now with us, when a great many people did not know what to do with their money. There were sumptuary laws which forbade their spending it, either they or their wives or daughters, in dress; apparently they could not even wear Genoa velvet, which had to be sold abroad for the corruption of the outside world; and this is said to be the reason why there were so many palaces built in Genoa in the days of the republic. People who did not wish to figure in that hall of fame put their surplus into the immense and often ugly edifices which we still see ministering to their pride in the wide and narrow streets of the city. Now and then a devout family built or rebuilt a church and gave it to the public; but by far the greater number put up palaces, where, after the house-warming, they dwelt in a cold and economical seclusion. Some of their palaces are now devoted to public uses; they are galleries of pictures and statues most worthy to be seen, or they are municipal offices, or museums, or schools of art or science; but part are still in the keeping of the families that contributed them to the splendor of their city. The streets in which they stand are loud with transit and traffic, but the palaces hold aloof from the turmoil and lift their lofty heads to the level of the gardens behind them. Huge, heavy they are, according to the local ideal, and always wanting the delicacy of Venetian architecture, where something in the native genius tempered to gentleness the cold severity of Palladio, and where Sansovino knew how to bridge the gulf between the Gothic and the Renascent art that would have been Greek but halted at being Roman.

The grandeur of those streets of palaces in Genoa cannot be denied, but perhaps, if the visitor quite consulted his preference or indulged his humor, he would wander rather through the arcades of the busy port, up the chasmal alleys of little shops into the tiny piazzas, no bigger than a good-sized room, opening before some ancient church and packed with busy, noisy people. The perspective there is often like the perspective in old Naples, but the uproar in Genoa does not break in music as it does in Naples, and the chill lingering in the sunless depths of those chasms is the cold of a winter that begins earlier and a spring that loiters later than the genial seasons of the South.



X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL

A few years ago an Englishman who had lived our neighbor in the same villa at San Remo, came and said that he was going away because it was so dull at San Remo. He was going with his wife to Monte Carlo, because you could find amusement every day in the week at the tables of the different games of chance, and Sundays there was a very nice little English church. He did not seem to think there was anything out of the way in his grouping of these advantages, but he did not strongly urge them upon us, and we restricted ourselves in turn to our tacit reflections on the indifference of the English to a point of morals on which the American conscience is apt to suffer more or less anguish if it offends. So far as I know they do not think it wrong to take money won at any game; but possibly their depravity in this matter rather comforted us than offended. At any rate, I am sure of the superiority of our own morals in visiting Monte Carlo after we left Genoa. If we did not look forward with our Englishman's complacency to the nice little church there, we certainly did not mean to risk our money at the tables of Roulette, nor yet at the tables of Trente et Quarante, in the Casino. What we really wished to do was to look on in the spiritual security of saints while the sinners of both sexes lost and gained to the equal hurt of their souls. We perhaps expected to hear the report of a pistol in the gardens of the Casino, if we did not actually see the ruined gambler falling among the flowers, or if not so much as this, we thought we might witness his dramatic despair as the croupier drew in the last remnant of his fortune and mechanically invited the other Messieurs and Mesdames to make their game; secretly, we might even have been willing to see something hysterical on the part of the Mesdames if fate frowned upon them, or something scandalously exuberant if it smiled. If our motives were not the worst, they were, at any rate, not the best; I suppose they were the usual human motives, and I am afraid they were mixed.

We found it rather long from Genoa to Monte Carlo, but this was not so much because of the distance as because of the delays of our train, which, having started late, grew reckless on the way, and before we reached the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, had lost all shame and failed to connect there with the French train for the rest of our journey. So, instead of having barely time to affirm our innocence of tobacco, spirits, or perfumes to the customs officers, and to wash down a sandwich with a cup of coffee at the restaurant, we had an hour and forty minutes at Ventimiglia, which I partly spent in vain attempts to buy the poverty of the inspector so far as to prevail with him not to delay the examination of our baggage, but to proceed to it at once, in order that we might have it all off our minds, and devote our long leisure to the inquiry by what steps the ancient Ligurian tribe of the Intemelii lost their name in its actual corruption of Ventimiglia. It is a charming old town, far more charming than the stranger who never has time to walk into it from the station can imagine, and there is a palm-bordered avenue leading from the railway to the sea, with the shops and cafes of Italy on one side and the shops and cafes of France on the other. So late as six o'clock in the evening those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight for any less reason; it seemed a lonesome place, though mighty picturesque, with old walls, and a magnificent old fort toward the sea, and a fine bridge spanning, though for the moment superfluously spanning, the perfectly dry bed of a river.

I wished to ask what the name of the river was, but out of all the files of people coming and going I chose an aged man who could not tell me; he excused himself with real regret on the ground that he was a stranger in those parts. Then there was nothing for me to do but go back to the station and renew my attempt on the inspector, who still remained proof against me. What added to the hardship of the situation was that it was Italy at one end of the station and France at the other, and in one extremity it was an hour earlier than it was at the other, by the time of Central Europe at the east and by the time of Paris at the west, so that I do not know but we were two hours and forty minutes at Ventimiglia instead of one hour and forty minutes. Of this period little could be employed at tea, and we were not otherwise hungry; we could give something of our interminable leisure to counting our baggage and suffering unfounded alarms at failing to make it come out right, but we could not give much.

The weather had turned chilly, the long station was full of draughts, and the invalid of the party, without whom no American party is perfectly national, was rapidly taking cold. We were quite incredulous when the examination actually began, but at last it really did, and it began with our pieces, with such a show of favoring us on the inspector's part, that when it was over, in about two minutes, one trunk serving as a type of the innocence of all, I furtively held up a piece of five francs in recognition of his kindness. But he slowly shook his head, whether in regret or whether in stern refusal I shall never know. He was an Italian, but in the employment of the French republic, and I have not been able since to credit with certainty his incorruptibility to his native or his adoptive country; I might easily be mistaken in deciding either way.

What I am certain of, and certainly sorry for, is the superiority of the French company's railway carriage, from Ventimiglia on, to the Italian carriage which had brought us so far, and it is still with unwillingness that I own the corporation's greater care for our comfort. If we had been in the paternal care of the administration of the gambling-house. at Monte Carlo, we could not have been more tenderly or cleanly cushioned about, or borne away on softer springs; and very possibly a measure of wickedness in the means is a condition of comfort in the end to which we are so tempted to abandon ourselves in a world which is not yet so sternly collectivist as I could wish. It was not quite dark when we arrived at Monte Carlo and began to experience, in the beautiful keeping of the place, how admirably a gambling-house can manage the affairs of a principality when it pays all the taxes. There were many two-horse landaus waiting our pleasure outside the station, and the horses were all so robust and handsome that we were not put to our usual painful endeavor in seeking the best and getting the worst. All those stately equipages were good, and the one that fell to us mounted the hill to our hotel by a grade so insinuating that the balkiest horse in Frascati could hardly have suspected it.

In our easy ascent we were aware of the gray-and-blond houses behind their walls among their groves and gardens, among flowers and blossoms; of the varying inclines and levels from which some lovely difference of prospect appeared at every step; of the admirably tended roadways, and the walks that followed them up hill and down, and crossed to little parks, or led to streets brilliant with shops and hotels, clustering about the great gambling-house, the centre of the common prosperity and animation. The air had softened with the setting sun, and the weather which had at Leghorn and Genoa delayed through two weeks of rain and cold, seemed to confess the control of the Casino administration, as everything else does at Monte Carlo, and promised an amiability to which we eagerly trusted.



It was of course warmer out-doors than in-doors, and while the fire was kindling on our hearth we gave the quarter hour before dinner to looking over our garden-wall into the comely town in the valley below, and to the palace and capital of the Prince of Monaco on the heights beyond. Nothing by day or by night could be more exquisite than the little harbor, a perfect horseshoe in shape, and now, at our first sight of it, set round with electric lights, like diamonds in the scarf-pin of some sporty Titan, or perhaps of Hercules Monoecus himself, who is said to have founded Monaco. In the morning we saw that the waters arranged themselves in the rainbow colors of such a scarf round the shores, and that there were only pleasure-craft moored in them: the yacht of the Prince of Monaco and the yacht of some American Prince, whose title I did not ascertain, but whose flag was unmistakable. There must have been other yachts, but I do not remember them, and possibly there were some workaday craft, of which I do not now recall the impression; but I am certain of the festive air of disoccupation pervading the port from the adjacent towns, both Monte Carlo and Monaco, which its wicked suburb has cleansed in corrupting, and rendered attractive by the example of its elegant leisure. There remains from both places, and from Condamine in the plain between them the sense of a perpetual round of holidays. There seemed to be no more creative business in one place than another, but I do not say there is none; there is certainly a polite distillery of perfumes and liqueurs in Condamine, but what one sees is the commerce of the shops, and the building up of more and more villas and hotels, on every shelf and ledge, to harden and whiten in the sun, and let their gardens hang over the verges of the cliffs. On the northeast, the mountains rise into magnificent steeps whose names would say nothing to the reader, except that of Turbia, which he will recall as the classic Tropaea of Augustus, who marked there the bounds between Italy and Gaul. But we were as yet in no mood to climb this height, even with the help of a funicular railway, and I made my explorations at such convenient elevations as I could reach on foot, or by the help of one of those luxurious landaus peculiar to Monte Carlo.

One such point was undoubtedly the headland of Monaco, where the Greeks of Marseilles, long enough before Augustus, built a temple to Hercules Monoecus. The Grimaldi family which gave Genoa many doges, came early into the sovereignty of Monaco, by the hook or crook those days, but whether it was they who fostered its piracy in the fourteenth century, does not distinctly appear, though it seems certain that one of the Grimaldi princes served against the English under Philip of Valois, and was wounded at Crecy. In 1524 a successor went over to the empire under Charles V. Still later the principality returned to the sovereignty of France, and in 1793 the French republicans frankly annexed it, but it was given back to the Grimaldi in 1814.

The Grimaldi on the whole were a baddish line of potentates, and only lacked largeness of scene to have left the memory of world-tragedies. They murdered one another, at least in two cases; in another, the people killed their ruler by publicly drowning him in the sea for insulting their women; the princes were the protectors of piracy, and in the very late times following their restoration by the Congress of Vienna, the reigning prince confiscated the property of the churches for his own behoof, and took into his hands the whole trade of the principality. He alone bought and ground the grain, and baked the bread, which he sold to his people at an extortionate price; he bought damaged flour in Genoa and fed it to his subjects at the same rate as good. When they murmured and threatened rebellion, he threatened in turn that he would rule them with a rod of iron, as if their actual conditions were not bad enough. Some of his oppressions were of a fantasticality bordering on comic opera: travellers had to give up their provisions at the frontier and eat the official bread of Monaco; ships entering the port were confiscated if they had brought more loaves than sufficed them for their voyage thither; no man might cut his own wood without leave of the police, or prune his trees, or till his land, or irrigate it; the birth and death of every animal must be publicly registered, with the payment of a given tax, and nobody could go out after ten at night without carrying a taxed lantern. When Nice was annexed to France in 1860 Monaco passed under French protection again, and now it is subject to conscription like the rest of France. Ten years after the beginning of this new order of things the great M. Blanc was expelled from Hombourg, and the Prince of Monaco rented to him the-gambling privilege of Monte Carlo.

Then the modern splendor of the place began. The entire population of the three towns, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Condamine, is not above fifteen thousand, and apparently the greater part of the inhabitants depend upon the gay industry of the Casino for their livelihood. I should say that the most of the houses in Monte Carlo were hotels, or pensions, or furnished villas, or furnished apartments, and if one could be content to live in the atmosphere of the Casino, which is not meteorologically lurid, I do not know where one could live in greater comfort. It is said that everything is rather dearer than in Nice, for instance, but such things as I wanted to buy I did not find very dear. The rates at the most expensive hotels did not seem exhorbitant when reduced to dollars, and if you went a little way from the Casino the hotels were very reasonable, so that you could spend a great deal of money at the tables which in America you would spend in board and lodging. I fancy that a villa could be got there very reasonably, and as the morals of all the inhabitants are scrupulously cared for by the administration of the Casino, and no one living in the principality is allowed to frequent the gaming-tables, it is probable that domestic service is good and cheap. If I may speak from our experience at our very simple little hotel, it is admirable, one waiter sufficing for ten or twelve guests, with leisure for much friendly conversation in the office, between the breakfasts served in our rooms and the excellent dinners at the small tables in the salon. If you liked, he would speak French or Italian, though he spoke English as well as any one, and he was of that excellent Piedmontese race which has been the saving salt of the whole peninsula. As for the food, it was far beyond that of our cold-storage, and it must have been cheap, since it was provided for us at the rate we paid.

The cost of dress varies, according to the taste of and the purse, everywhere. White serge seemed the favorite wear of most of the ladies one saw in the street at Monte Carlo, especially in the region of the Casino. This may have expressed an inner condition, or it may have been a sympathetic response to the advances of the flowers in the pretty beds and parterres so fancifully designed by the gardeners of the administration, or it may have been a token of the helpless submission to which the windows of the milliners and modistes reduced all comers of the dressful sex. Many of the men with the women, or without them, were also in white serge, but they seemed more variably attired; there was a prevailing suggestion of yachting or automobiling in their dress, though doubtless most of them had not sailed or motored to the spot. Some few, say four or five, may have motored away from it, for in the centre of the charming square before the Casino there was an automobile of some newest type being raffled for in the interest of that chiefest of the Christian virtues which makes its most successful appeals in the vicinity of games of chance. Some one must have won the machine and carried a party of his friends away, and triumphantly turned turtle with it over the first of the precipices which abound at Monte Carlo. More than the tables within this opportunity of fortune tempted me, and it was only by the repeated recurrence to my principles that I was able to get away alive. In spite of myself, I did not get away without, however guiltlessly, having yielded to the spirit of the place. It was at the Administrational Art Exhibition, where there were really some good pictures, and where, on my entering, I was given a small brass disk. On going out I attempted to restore this to the door-keeper, but he went back with me to a certain piece of mechanism, where he instructed me to put the disk into a slot. Then the disk ran its course, and a small brass ball came out at the bottom. The door-keeper opened this, and showed me that it was empty; but he gave me to understand that it might have been full of diamonds, or rubies, or seed-pearls, which might have implanted in me a lust of gambling I should never have overcome. Monte Carlo was in every way tempting. A vast oblong, brilliant with flowers in artistic patterns, stretched upward from the Casino, and there was an agreeable park where one might sit. On every other side there were costly hotels and costly restaurants, including that of the unexampled, the insurpassable Giro, where one saw people eating and drinking at the windows whenever one passed, by day or night. Beyond the Casino seaward were the beautiful terraces, planted with palms and other tropic growths, where people might come out and kill themselves when they had nothing left to lose but their lives; and against the dark green of their fronds the temple of fortune lifted a frosted-cake-like front of long extent. I do not know just what type of architecture it is of, but it distinctly suggests the art of the pastry cook when he has triumphed in some edifice crowning the centre of the table at a great public dinner. What mars the pleasing effect most is a detail which enforces this suggestion, for the region of the Casino is thickly frequented by a species of black doves, and when these gather in close lines of black dots along the eaves, they have exactly the effect of flies clustering on the sugary surfaces of the cake. At intervals are bronze statues of what seem a sort of adolescent cherubs, but which have, I do not know why, a peculiarly devilish appearance. No doubt they are harmless enough; but certainly they do nothing to keep the flies off the cake.

In fine, as an edifice the Casino disappoints, and if one is not pressingly curious about the interior, one rather lingers on the terrace overlooking the sea, and the lines of the railroad following the shore, and the panorama of the several towns. It is charming to sit there, and if it is in the afternoon, you may see an artist there painting water-colors of the scenery. Even if he were not painting, you could not help knowing him for an artist, because he wears a black velvet jacket and knickerbockers, and a soft slouch hat, and has a curled black mustache and pointed beard; there is no mistaking him; and at a given moment, after he has been working long enough, he puts above his sketch the sign, "For Sale," as artists always do, and then, if you want a masterpiece, you go down a few steps from where you are sitting and buy it. But I never did that any more than I took tickets for the charity automobile, though there is no telling what I might not have done if I had broken the bank when at last I went into the Casino.

It seems to open about eleven o'clock in the morning, for gamblers are hard-working, impatient people, and do not want to lose time. A broad stretch of red carpet is laid down the steps from the portal and they begin to go in at once, and people keep going in until I know not what hour at night. But I think mid-afternoon is the best hour to see them, and it is then that I will invite the reader to accompany me, instructing him to turn to the left on entering, and get his gratis billet of admission to the rooms from the polite officials there in charge, who will ask for his card, and inquire his country and city, but will not insist upon his street and his number in it. This form is apparently to make sure that you are not a resident of the principality, and that if you suffer in your morals from your visit to the Casino you shall not be a source of local corruption thereafter. They bow you away, first audibly pronouncing your name with polyglottic accuracy, and then you are free to wander where you like. But probably you will want to go at once from the large, nobly colonnaded reception-hall or atrium, into that series of salons where wickeder visitors than yourself are already closely seated at the oblong tables, and standing one or two deep round them. The salons of the series are four, and the tables in each are from two to five, according to the demands of the season; some are Trente et Quarante-tables, and some, by far the greater number, are Roulette-tables. Roulette seems the simpler game, and the more popular; I formed the notion that there was a sort of aristocratic quality in Trente et Quarante, and that the players of that game were of higher rank and longer purse, but I can allege no reason justifying my notion. All that I can say is that the tables devoted to it commanded the seaward views, and the tops of the gardens where the players withdrew when they wished to commit suicide. The rooms are decorated by several French painters of note, and the whole interior is designed by the famous architect Gamier, to as little effect of beauty as could well be. It is as if these French artists had worked in the German taste, rather than their own, and in any case they have achieved in their several allegories and impersonations something uniformly heavy and dull. One might fancy that the mood of the players at the tables had imparted itself to the figures in the panels, but very likely this is not so, for the players had apparently parted with none of their unpleasing dulness. They were in about equal number men and women, and they partook equally of a look of hard repression. The repression may not have been wholly from within; a little away from each table hovered, with an air of detachment, certain plain and quiet men, who, for all their apparent inattention, may have been agents of the Administration vigilant to subdue the slightest show of drama in the players. I myself saw no drama, unless I may call so the attitude of a certain tall, handsome young man, who stood at the corner of one of the tables, and, with nervously working jaws, staked his money at each invitation of the croupiers. I did not know whether he won or lost, and I could not decide from their faces which of the other men or women were winning or losing. I had supposed that I might see distinguished faces, distinguished figures, but I saw none. The players were of the average of the spectators in dress and carriage, but in the heavy atmosphere of the rooms, which was very hot and very bad, they all alike looked dull. At a psychological moment it suddenly came to me in their presence, that if there was such a place as hell, it must be very dull, like that, and that the finest misery of perdition must be the stupid dulness of it. For some unascertained reason, but probably from a mistaken purpose of ornament, there hung over the centre of each table, almost down to the level of the players' heads, lengths of large-linked chains, and it was imaginable, though not very probable, that if any of the lost souls rose violently up, or made an unseemly outcry, or other rebellious demonstration, those plain, quiet men, the agents of the Administration, would fling themselves upon him or her, and bind them with those chains, and cast them into such outer darkness as could be symbolized by the shade of the terrace trees. The thing was improbable, as I say, but not impossible, if there is truth in Swedenborg's relation that the hells are vigilantly policed, and from time to time put in order by angels detailed for that office. To be sure the plain, quiet men did not look like angels, and the Administration of which they were agents, could not, except in its love of order, be likened to any celestial authority.

Commonly in the afternoon there is music in the great atrium from which the gambling-rooms open, and then there is a pleasant movement of people up and down. They are kept in motion perhaps by their preference, somewhat, but also largely by the want of seats. If you can secure one of these you may amuse yourself very well by looking on at the fashion and beauty of those who have not secured any. Here you will see much more distinction than in the gambling-rooms; the air is better, and if you choose to fancy this the limbo of that inferno, it will not be by a violent strain. In the crowd will be many pretty young girls, in proper chaperonage, and dressed in the latest effects of Paris; if they happen to be wearing the mob-cap hats of the moment it is your greater gain; they could not be so charming in anything else, or look more innocent, or more consciously innocent. You could only hope, however, such were the malign associations of the place, that their chaperons would not neglect them for the gaming-tables beyond, but you could not be sure, if the chaperons were all like that old English lady one evening at the opera in the Casino, who came in charge of her niece, or possibly some friend's daughter. She remained dutifully enough beside the girl through the first act of the stupid musical comedy, and even through the ensuing ballet, and when a flaunting female, in a hat of cart-wheel circumference, came in and shut out the whole stage from the hapless stranger behind, this good old lady authorized her charge to ask him to take the seat next them where he could see something of the action if he wished. But at the end of the ballet, she rose, and bidding the girl wait her return, she vanished in the direction of the gaming-rooms. She may merely have gone to look on at a spectacle which, dulness for dulness, was no worse than that of the musical comedy, and I have no proof that she risked her money there. The girl sat through the next act, and then in a sudden fine alarm, like that of a bird which, from no visible cause, starts from its perch, she took flight, and I hope she found her aunt, or her mother's friend, quietly sleeping on one of those seats in the atrium. It was one of those tacit, eventless dramas which in travel are always offering themselves to your witness. They begin in silence, and go quietly on to their unfinish, and leave you steeped in an interest which is life-long, whereas a story whose end you know soon perishes from your mind. Art has not yet learned the supreme lesson of life, which is never a tale that is told within the knowledge of the living.

Nowhere, I think, is the "sweet security of streets" felt more than in Monte Carlo. Whether the control of that good Administration of the Casino reaches to the policing of the place in other respects or not, I cannot say, but one walks home at night from the theatre of the Casino with the same sense of safety that one enjoys under that paternal roof. At eleven o'clock all Monte Carlo sleeps the sleep of the innocent and the just in the dwellings of the citizens and permanent residents; though it cannot be denied that there appear to be late suppers in the hotels and restaurants surrounding the Casino, which the iniquitous may be giving to the guilty. Away from the flare of their bold lights the town reposes in a demi-dark, and presents to the more strenuous fancy the effect of a mezzotint study of itself; by day it is a group of wash-drawings near to, and farther off, of water-colors, very richly and broadly treated. I could not insist too much upon this notion with the reader who has never been there, or has not received picture postal-cards from sojourning correspondents. These would afford him a portrait of the chief features and characteristics of the place not too highly flattered, for in fact it would be impossible for even a picture postal-card to exaggerate its beauty. They will besides convey one of the few convincing proofs that in spite of the Blanc Casino and the French Republic the Prince of Monaco is still a reigning sovereign, for the postage-stamps bear the tastefully printed head of that potentate. If the visitor requires other proofs he may take a landau at the station in Monaco, and drive up over the heights of the capital into the piazza before the prince's palace. When the prince is not at home he can readily get leave to visit the palace for twenty minutes, but on my unlucky day the prince was doubly at home, for he was sick as well as in residence. I satisfied myself as well as I could, and I am very easy to satisfy, with my drive through the pleasant town, which is entirely Italian in effect, with its people standing about or looking out of their windows in their Sunday leisure, and quite Roman in the cleanliness of its streets. I took due pleasure in the unfinished exterior of the Oceanographic Museum and the newly finished interior of the Monaco Cathedral. The cathedral, which is so new as to make one rejoice that most other cathedrals are old, is of a glaring freshness, but is very handsome; somehow in spite of its newness it contains the tombs of the reigning family, and perhaps it has only been newly done over. The museum which is ultimately to be the greatest of its kind in the world, already contains somewhere in its raw inaccessible recesses the collections made by Prince Albert in his many cruises, and is of a palatiality worthy of a sovereign with a tenant so generous and prompt in its rent as the Administration of the Casino of Monte Carlo.



This fact, namely, that the princely grandeur and splendor of Monaco all came out of the gaming-tables, was something that the driver of my landau made me observe, when our intimacy had mounted with our road, and we paused for the magnificent view of the sea from the headland near the museum. He was otherwise a shrewd and conversible Piedmontese who did not make me pay much above the tariff, and who had pity on my poor French after awhile, and consented to speak Italian with me. In the sort of French glare over the whole local civilization of the principality, everybody will wish to seem French, but after you break through the surface, the natives will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as anybody in the peninsula. Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois, but with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better than his, and also much better than their own French. I think they prefer you in their racial parlance after you have shown some knowledge of it, and two kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I was trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more volubly kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command. That station is really not hard to find when once you know where it is, and at three o'clock in the afternoon I was mounting the precipitous incline of the alp on whose summit Augustus divided Italy from Gaul, and left the stupendous trophy which one sees there in ruins to-day.

I should like to render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by pretending that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I really noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard seemed to grow less and the olive-trees scraggier. Perhaps even this was partly fancy; as for the flowers, I cannot bring myself to partake of their deceit; for they are the most shameless fakers, as regards climate, in nature. It is, for instance, perfectly true that they are in bloom along the Riviera all winter long, but this does not prove that the winter of the Riviera is always warm. It merely proves that flowers can stand a degree of cold that nips the nose bent to hale their perfume, and brings tears into the eyes dwelling in rapture on their loveliness. They are like women; they look so fragile and delicate that you think they cannot stand anything, but they can stand pretty much everything, or at least everything they wish to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we cowered round our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers smiled from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their sisters passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the details of the scenery through which my funicular was passing than to the stupendous prospects of sea and shore which it varyingly commanded. If words could paint these I should not spare the words, but when I recall them, my richest treasure of adjectives seems a beggarly array of color tubes, flattened and twisted past all col-lapsibility. Nothing less than an old-fashioned panoramic show would impart any notion of it, and even that must fail where it should most abound, namely, in the delicacy of that ineffable majesty.

We climbed and climbed, with many a muted hope and many a muted fear of the mechanism which carried us so safely, and then we ran across a stretch of comparative level and reached the last station, under the cliff on which the local hotel stood, with the mighty ruin behind it. Our passengers flocked up to the terrace of the hotel, much shoved and shouldered by automobiles bearing the company which seems proper to those vehicles, and dispersed themselves at the many little tables set about for tea, and the glory of the matchless outlook. While one could yet have the ruin mostly to one's self, it seemed the most favorable moment to visit the crumbling walls and broken tower, whose fragments strewed the slopes around. The tower was of Augustus, and the fortress into which it was turned in the Middle Ages was of unknown authority, but the ruin was the work of Marshal Villars, who blew up both trophy and stronghold sometime in the French king's wars with the imperialists in the first half of the eighteenth century. The destruction was incomplete, though probably sufficient for the purpose, but as a ruin, nothing could be more admirable. There seems to be at present something like a restoration going on; it has not gone very far, however; it has developed some fragments of majestic pillars, and some breadths of Roman brick-work; a few spaces about the base of the tower are cleared; but the rehabilitation will probably never proceed to such an extreme that you may not sit down on some carven remnant of the past, and closing your eyes to the surrounding glory of alp and sea find yourself again on the Palatine or amid the memorials of the Forum.

THE END