these two kinds are so like
each other, in the mass, that this boundless forest of olives around
Tivoli offered an image of all the aggregated apple-orchards in the
world. Where the trees came closest to the road they seemed to watch our
passing, each with its trunk aslant and its branches akimbo, in a
humorous make-believe of being in some joke with us, like so many
gnarled and twisted apple-trees, used to children's play-fellowship. You
felt a racial intimacy with the whimsical and antic shapes which your
brief personal consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the
slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the
Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they
lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea
against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar
silence, full of mystery and loneliness.

If Tivoli does not flourish so frankly on its oil as Frascati on its
wine, it is perhaps because it has of late years tacitly prospered as
much on the electricity which its wonderful and beautiful waterfalls
enable it to furnish as abundantly to Rome as our own Niagara to
Buffalo. The scrupulous Hare, whose _Walks in Rome_ include Tivoli, does
not, indeed, advise you to visit the electrical works, but he says that
if you have not strength enough for all the interests and attractions of
Tivoli it will be wise to give yourself entirely to the cascades and to
the Villa d'Este, and this was what we instinctively did, but in the
reverse order. Chance rewarded us before we left the villa with a sight
of the electric plant, which just below the villa walls smokes
industriously away with a round, redbrick chimney almost as lofty and as
ugly as some chimney in America. On our way to and fro we necessarily
passed through the town, which, with its widish but not straightish
chief street, I found as clean as Rome itself, and looking, after the
long tumult of its history, beginning well back in fable, as peaceable
as Montclair, New Jersey. It had its charm, and, if I could have spent
two weeks there instead of two hours, I might impart its effect in much
more circumstance than I can now promise the reader. Most of my little
time I gladly gave to the villa, which, with the manifold classic
associations of the region, attracts the stranger and helps the
cataracts sum up all that most people can keep of Tivoli.

[Illustration: 38 STAIRWAY AND FOU