ngled with glory the green
plain, as the milky-way the firmament. There is nothing in nature like
these Alpine rivers. They fill their banks with such a wasteful
prodigality of water, and they go on their way with a conscious might,
as if they felt that behind them is an eternally exhaustless source. Let
the sun smite them with his fiercest ray; they dread him not. Others may
shrink and dry up under his beam: their fountains are the snows of a
thousand winters.

On reaching the station, our _diligence_,--including passengers, and all
that pertained to them,--was lifted from its truck and put on wheels,
and once more stood ready to move, in virtue of its own inherent power,
that is, so soon as the horses should be attached. This operation was
performed in the calm eve, amid the glancing casements of the little
town, on which the purple hills and the tall silent poplars looked
complacently down.

Away we rumbled, the declining light still resting sweetly on the woods
and hamlets. There are no postilions in the world, I believe, who can
handle their whip like those of Italy. In very pride and joy our
postilion cracked his whip, till the woods rang again. He took a
peculiar delight in startling the echoes of the old villages, and the
ears of the old villagers. Each report was like that of a
twelve-pounder. This continual thunder, kept up above their heads, did
not in the least affright the horses: they rather seemed proud of a
master who could handle his whip in so workmanlike a fashion. He could
so time the strokes as to make not much worse melody than that of some
music-bells I have heard. He could play a tune on his whip.

We passed, as the evening thickened its shadows, several ancient
_borgos_. Gray they were, and drowsy, as if the sleep of a century
weighed them down. They seemed to love the quiet, dying light of eve;
and as they drew its soft mantle around them, they appeared most willing
to forget a world which had forgotten them. They had not always led so
quiet a life. Their youth had been passed amid the bustle of commerce;
their manhood amid the alarms and rude shocks of war; and now, in their
old age, they bore plainly the marks of the many shrewd brushes they had
had to sustain when young. The houses were tall and roomy, and their
architecture of a most substantial kind; but they had come to know
strange tenants, that is, those of them that _had_ tenants, for not a
few seemed empty. At the doors of others,