troughs made by the former and so off the
house. The peasants' cottages are thatched with flags or straw, and
often built of the latter material. Of barns there are relatively few,
most of the wheat being stacked when harvested, and trodden out by oxen
on floors under the open sky. I have not seen a good harness nor a
respectable ox-yoke in Italy, most of the oxen having yokes which a
Berkshire hog of any pretensions to good breeding would disdain to look
through. These yokes merely hold the meek animals together, having no
adaptation to draft, which is obtained by a cobbling filigree of ropes
around the head, bringing the heaviest of the work upon the horns! The
gear is a little better than this--as little as you please--while for
Carts and Waggons there are few school-boys of twelve to fifteen in
America who would not beat the average of all I have seen in Italy.
Their clumsiness and stupidity are so atrocious that the owners do well
in employing asses to draw them: no man of feeling or spirit could
endure the horse-laughs they must extort from any animal of tolerable
sagacity. To see a stout, two-handed man coming home with his
donkey-load of fuel from a distant shrubbery, half a day of the two
having been spent in getting as much as would make one good
kitchen-fire, is enough to try the patience of Job.

Although the Po must be navigable and has been navigated by steamboats
for many miles above this point, until obstructed by rapids, yet nothing
like a steamboat was visible. The only craft I saw attempting to stem
its current was a rude sort of ark, like a wider canal-boat, drawn by
three horses traveling on a wide, irregular tow-path along the levee or
bank. I presume this path does not extend many miles without meeting
impediments. Quite a number of ruinous old rookeries were anchored in
the river at intervals, usually three to six abreast, which I found to
be grist-mills, propelled by the strong current, and receiving their
grain from the shore and returning the flour by means of small boats.
Our ferry-boat was impelled by what is termed (I think) a "rope
ferry"--a series of ropes and boats made fast to some anchorage in the
stream above, and moving it vigorously and expeditiously from one bank
to the other by the mere force of the current. It is quite evident that
modern Italy did not originate this contrivance, nor even the idea that
a rapid river could be induced to move a large boat obliquely up its
stream a