or Amazon. This the lazy Roman sea does, and it is
surely an unusual feat: roll its shingle into vague shapes of symbolic
hearts, hearts of serpentine, of jasper, of various beautiful rose and
lilac breccias, of basalt, and of fine rose brick, all scattered on
the glittering black sand (with funny mourning edges of violet
shells), and in the lip of those little black waves. But far more
beautiful and extraordinary and brilliant (and to me far more
wonderful and odd) was the still uncorrupted little corpse of a
kingfisher: sky-blue breast, greenish turquoise ruff, and glossy dark
back, lying in state, as dead birds do.

_April_ 29.

VIII.

FIUMICINO.

Three days ago, in heavy rain, taken in motor to Fiumicino. Impression
of grass, yellow with buttercups, soused with rain, opening, falling
aside as we swish noiselessly into it, under the moving dark sky.
Magliana: a big farm; one takes a minute in the soaking filthy yard,
among manure and litter, to recognise that this dilapidated,
leprous-looking building is a palace, with mullioned fifteenth-century
windows and coats of arms and inscriptions of Cibo and Riario popes.
From the top of the wide low-stepped staircase (like that, also of the
Cibo's originally, of Pal. Ruffo), wide views of meadows of pale
rumpled grass, yellow here, and there with clover, and a great yellow
Tiber arm unaccountable in this sort of England. This is the place, I
believe, where the quails are shot and netted at this time of year;
and I suppose Leo X. was on some such expedition when he caught his
death here.

Fiumicino, a canal or arm of the Tiber, a yellowish marsh, a big,
uprooted looking martello tower by the beach, and a little pier with a
green boat like a beetle in the rain. The look of Viareggio or Porto
Corsini, of all the little God-forsaken and strangled harbours of this
country. The sacred island, I suppose, on the other side of a bridge
of boats, covered with what seems a scrub of ilex and lentisk.

IX.

VIA ARDEATINA.

Yesterday, again in pelting rain, far along Via Ardeatina (the brutes
have taken away the little river god from off that trough in the
little valley of poplars). The hollows full of foaming yellow streams,
and yellow water gushing everywhere. The great wet green slopes under
the dark low sky, with only sheep and here and there a stump of
masonry, no trees, no hedges, no walls save of rough stones, no
bounding mountains, visible; the whole