peaceful promenade, like most of
such mediaeval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little
military life did not still linger about a bastion here and there.
From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk
upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that
the only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were
the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grossetto for
the excellent shooting in the marshes. All the way to Florence we
continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto
overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the
court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which
a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great,
noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled,
and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our
sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that
the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond
them. He was part of the repairs and improvements which that
hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with
the four-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel,
Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the
iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with
the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with
great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the
rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know
what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly
conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a
great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded, "_Bifsteca di manzo, o
bifsteca di motone_?"--"Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mutton?"

Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I
heard singing after dark in the streets,--

"Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!"

The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of _forza maggiore_, as
the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing
us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early
part of the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were
travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more
or less interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu
de la Drome,--the only reliable prophet Fr