-spreading horns and mellow eyes,
at the passing train; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the
application of the goad; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of
the firm-minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomotive seems
to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of
Spring.

At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the
customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of
contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who
had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and
of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to
drink our health--with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of
wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d'Oro, and set forth from the gate
of the old city.

I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of
proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient
speed, which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and
_buonamano_, I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the
journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape
with a cumulative feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me,
old women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle,
flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved
back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the
fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons,
or red caps. The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in
effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young
girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we
passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more
about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the
vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless
fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its
guardian poplars,--I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so
much of these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to
themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping
villages, taking the street from everybody, and fading magnificently
away upon the road.

III.

TRIESTE.

If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six
o'clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter
the broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-