ey rise in tender azure
before you as you issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in
loveliness as you draw nearer to them from the rich plain that washes
their feet with endless harvests of oil and wine.

Oh beauty that will not let itself be told! Could I not take warning
from another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description? A
friend in Padua had lent me Disraeli's "Venetia," because a passage
of the story occurs in Petrarch's house at Arqua, and we carried the
volumes with us on our pilgrimage. I would here quote the description
of the village, the house, and the hills from this work, as
faultlessly true, and as affording no just idea of either; but nothing
of it has remained in my mind except the geological fact that the
hills are a volcanic range. To tell the truth, the landscape, as we
rode along, continually took my mind off the book, and I could
not give that attention either to the elegant language of its
descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which
they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking
person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of
the city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your
rights in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your
contract that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but
yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaintance of the driver, for
they never exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for
the ride. He got down, in this instance, just before we reached the
little town at which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished
to drink a glass of the wine of the country. We did not, but his own
thirst seemed to answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at
our cost.

The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted
us on the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm
already mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the red grapes
were already purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed
a gorgeous necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent
festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts than this southern
splendor, were the russet fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among
the shrunken stalks, great nuggets of the "harmless gold" of pumpkins.

At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to
Arqua) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some