, delicate as a woman, forlorn upon the
mountains. Everywhere in the quiet afternoon songs come to you from the
shady woods, from the hillsides and the streams. Something of the
simplicity and joy of a life we have only known in our hearts is
expressed in every fold of the mountains, olive clad and terraced with
walks and vines, where the husbandman labours till evening and the corn
is ripe or reaping, and the sound of the flute dances like a fountain in
the shade. And so, when at evening you enter the noble city of Massa,
among the women sitting at their doors sewing or knitting in the sunset,
while the children, whole crowds of them, play in the narrow streets,
their laughter echoing among the old houses as the sun dances in a
narrow valley, or you pass among the girls who walk together in a
nosegay, arm in arm, or the young men who lounge together in a crowd
against the houses watching them, there is joy in your heart, because
this is life, simple and frank and full of hope, without an afterthought
or a single hesitation of doubt or fear.

There is little to be seen at Massa that is not just the natural beauty
of the place, set like a flower among the woods, that climb up to the
marble peaks. Not without a certain interest you come upon the
Prefettura, which once was the summer castle of Elisa Baciocchi,
Napoleon's sister, who as a gift from him held Lucca, and was much
beloved, from 1805 to 1814. And joyful as the country is under that
impartial sun, before that wide and ancient sea, among her quiet woods
and broken shrines, it is not without a kind of hesitation and shame
almost that you learn that the great fortress which crowns the city is
now a prison in which are many half-witted unhappy folk, who in this
transitory life have left the common way. It is strange that in so many
lands the prison is so often in a place of the greatest beauty. At
Tarragona, far away over the sea looking towards Italy, the hospital of
those who have for one cause or another fallen by the way is set by the
sea-shore, almost at the feet of the waves, so that in a storm the
momentary foam from those restless, free waters must often be scattered
about the courtyard, where those who have injured us, and whom in our
wisdom we have deprived of the world, are permitted to walk. It is much
the same in Tangier, where the horrid gaol, always full of groans and
the torture of the bastinado, is in the dip of the Kasbah, where it
joins the Europea