r this, and commiserates her
weariness with noble elegance and originality. "_La Signora si trova
un poco sagrificata_?" ("The lady feels slightly sacrificed!") We all
smile, and the little man very gladly with us.

"An elegant way of expressing it," we venture to suggest. The Veneto
roars and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman
himself. We never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed,
and it lasts us the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down
at his farm-gate, he first "reverences" us, and then says, "I am very
sorry for you others who must be still more slightly sacrificed."

At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so
gay, quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many _bei
bocconi_ on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine
temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any
American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere?

* * * * *

As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help
thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us
once as we rode southward from Venice toward Florence on that road
from Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time in Tuscany,
and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad
landscape: fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and
waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay cut
already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The green of the
fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the fig-trees
hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with vines,
which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to
tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the
slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under
the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched
cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation
the most picturesque peasants,--men and women, pretty young girls in
broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never
to have been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and
white, stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars
escort them wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the
butterflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn
up their patient heads, with wide