of the Vallombrosan Benedictines serve the church.

One returns always, I think, with regret from Montenero to Livorno; yet,
after all, not with more sadness than that which always accompanies us
in returning from the country to any city, howsoever fair and lovely.
God made the country; man made the town; and though in Italy both God
and man have laboured with joy and done better here than anywhere else
in the world, who would not leave the loveliest picture to look once
more on the sky, or neglect the sweetest music if he might always hear
the sea, or give up praising a statue, if he might always look on his
beloved? So it is in Italy, where all the cities are fair; flowers they
are among the flowers; yet any Tuscan rose is fairer far than ever Pisa
was, and the lilies of Madonna in the gardens of Settignano are more
lovely than the City of Flowers: come, then, let us leave the city for
the wayside, for the sun and the dust and the hills, the flowers beside
the river, the villages among the flowers. For if you love Italy you
will follow the road.

FOOTNOTES:

[81] Livorno, in the barbarian dialect of the Genovesi, Ligorno; and
hence our word Leghorn. It is excusable that we should have taken St.
George from Genoa, but not that we should have stolen her dialect also.

[82] Perhaps, but Bocca d'Arno, that delicious place, is far and far
to-day from Livorno.

VIII. TO SAN MINIATO AL TEDESCO

The road from Pisa to Florence, out of the Porta Fiorentina, to-day the
greatest gate of the city, passes at first across the Pisan plain,
beside Arno though not following it in its wayward and winding course,
to Cascina at the foot of those hills behind which Lucca is hidden away:
Monti Pisani

"Perche i Pisani veder Lucca non ponno."

And unlike the way through the Pineta to the sea, the road, so often
trodden by the victorious armies of Florence, is desolate and sombre,
while beside the way to-day a disused tramway leads to Calci in the
hills. On either side of this road, so deep in dust, are meadows lined
with bulrushes, while there lies a village, here a lonely church. It is
indeed a rather sombre world of half-reclaimed marshland that Pisa thus
broods over, in which the only landmarks are the far-away hills, the
smoke of a village not so far away, or the tower of a church rising
among these fields so strangely green. For Pisa herself is soon lost in
the vagueness of a world thus delicately touched by sun an