utually sympathetic comprehensions. In noble ambitions and
lofty purposes Americans and Italians are closely akin. In zeal for
contemporary scientific progress, in an intense susceptibility to the
glories of art, and in hospitality to all that makes for progress, both
nations meet in mutual recognition. Of no people is it more deeply true
than of Americans that "each man has two countries: his own and Italy."
The average traveller sees this fair land with a breadth and
thoroughness seldom called into requisition elsewhere. In England he is
usually content with London, the tour of the cathedral towns and the
lake region of the poets. France is summed up to him in Paris and in the
chateaux of outlying districts. But Italy beguiles the traveller into
every lonely foot-trail in the mountains; to every "piazza grande" of
lonely hamlets, isolated on a rocky hillside; to every "fortezza" that
crowns a mountain summit. The unexplored byways of Italy are magnetic in
their fascination, and one special source of congratulation on the part
of those fortunate tourists who travel with their own motor car is that
they are thus enabled to penetrate into untrodden byways in Italy in a
manner impossible to those who must depend entirely on the regulation
railroad service. All lovers of Italy are devoted to these original
tours of private exploration. A recent trip to Saracinesco, in the
region of Tivoli, was made by Mrs. Stetson (Grace Ellery Channing) with
her husband, and in a descriptive record of the little journey into an
unfrequented mountain region this paragraph occurs:--

"Roused by 'an awful rose of dawn' which turned every solemn slope
to strange amber and amethyst, we left that rocky eyrie next day,
returning by way of Anticoli--beloved of artists. And if the ascent
had qualified us for Alpine climbers, the descent qualified us as
members of the Italian cavalry corps. Pictures of officers riding
down the face of cliffs will never impress us again; we know now it
is the very simplest of 'stunts.' Our way down was diversified by
the tinkling of thousands of sheep-bells, by the far too close
proximity of bulls to Maria's crimson headdress, which nothing in
the world would induce her to remove, and by sundry meetings with
relations, long-unseen friends, and strangers, from whom we culled
the whole register of deaths, births, marriages, and happenings for
a month past