ntry-folk of Roccabruna
to S. Michael's Church at Mentone. High above the sea it stands,
and from its open doors you look across the mountains with their
olive-trees. Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk and
townspeople, mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesque
beyond description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shape
and depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of every
gruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness. Wherever an empty
corner can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies and
mischievous children. The country-women come with their large dangling
earrings of thin gold, wearing pink tulips or lemon-buds in their
black hair. A low buzz of gossiping and mutual recognition keeps the
air alive. The whole service seems a holiday--a general enjoyment of
gala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from the
silence, immobility, and _noli me tangere_ aspect of an English
congregation. Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ;
wailing, querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasal
chant--always beginning, never ending, through a range of two or three
notes ground into one monotony. The voices of the congregation
rise and sink above it. These southern people, like the Arabs, the
Apulians, and the Spaniards, seem to find their music in a hurdy-gurdy
swell of sound. The other day we met a little girl, walking and
spinning, and singing all the while, whose song was just another
version of this chant. It has a discontented plaintive wail, as if it
came from some vast age, and were a cousin of primeval winds.

At first sight, by the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The
valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey
upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat
earth is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed
invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the
kitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea.
It has no form or outline--no barren peaks, no spare and difficult
vegetation. The beauty is rich but tame--valleys green with oats and
corn, blossoming cherry-trees, and sweet bean-fields, figs coming into
leaf, and arrowy bay-trees by the side of sparkling streams: here and
there a broken aqueduct or rainbow bridge hung with maidenhair and
briar and clematis and sarsaparilla.

In the cathedral church of San Siro on G