omantic height on the south of Turin, washed
by the Po, with villas and temples on its crest and summits. I took my
way through the noble street that leads southwards, halting at the
book-stalls, and picking out of their heaps of rubbish an Italian copy
of the Catechism of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux. The Collina was all in a
blaze; the windows of the Palazzo Regina glittered in the setting beams;
and the dome of the Superga shone like gold. Crossing the Po, I ascended
by the winding avenue of shady acacias, which are planted there to
protect the cowled heads of the fathers from the noonday sun. One of the
monks was winding his way up hill, at a pace which gave me full
opportunity of observing him. A little black cap covered his scalp; his
round bullet-head, which bristled with short, thick-set hairs, joined
on, by a neck of considerably more than the average girth, to shoulders
of Atlantean dimensions. His body was enveloped in a coarse brown
mantle, which descended to his calves, and was gathered round his middle
with a slender white cord. His naked feet were thrust into sandals. The
features of the "religious" were coarse and swollen; and he strode up
hill before me with a gait which would have made a peaceful man, had he
met him on a roadside in Scotland, give him a wide offing. Parties of
soldiers wounded in the late campaign were sauntering in the square of
the monastery, or looking over the low wall at the city beneath. Their
pale and sickly looks formed a striking contrast to the athletic forms
of the full-fed monks. It was inexplicable to me, that the youth of
Sardinia, immature and raw, should be drafted into the army, while such
an amount of thews and sinews as this monastery, and hundreds more,
contained, should be allowed to run to waste, or worse. If but for their
health, the monks should be compelled to fight the next campaign.

The sun went down. Long horizontal shafts of golden light shot through
amidst the Alps; their snows glittered with a dazzling whiteness:
whiteness is a weak term;--it was a brilliant and lustrous glory, like
that of light itself. Anon a crimson blush ran along the chain. It
faded; it came again. A wall of burning peaks, from two to three hundred
miles in length, rose along the horizon. Eve, with her purple shadows,
drew on; and I left the mountains under a sky of vermilion, with Monte
Viso covering with its shadow the honoured dust that sleeps around it,
and pointing with its stony fi