more exquisite landscape than
I could have imagined, enchantingly Italian, with dark old chateaux
crowning eminences above fertile fields; pretty brown villages on
hillsides clustering round graceful campaniles (a word I've practised
lately with several other difficult ones); green-black cypresses (which
Maida says seem like sharp notes in music); and wonderful, flat-topped
trees that Mr. Barrymore calls umbrella pines.

We were now in a region known as the Brianza, which is, it appears, a
summer resort for the Milanese, who come to escape the hot weather of
the plains, and find the breezes that blow up from the lakes--breezes so
celebrated for their health-giving qualities that nobody who lives in
the Brianza can die under ninety. There were a great many inviting
looking, quaint farmhouses, and big cottages scattered about, where the
people from Milan are taken as lodgers.

I had forgotten my nervousness about the tyres, when suddenly a queer
thing happened. There was a wild flapping and beating as if a big bird
had got caught in the engine, while something strange and horrifying
kept leaping up and down with every revolution of the wheels, like a
huge black snake racing along with us and trying for a chance to pounce.
It was so like a weird and horrid dream that I shrieked; but in a few
seconds Mr. Barrymore had stopped the car. "We _are_ in luck," said he.

"Why?" I asked. "Have we killed the Serpent-thing--whatever it is?"

Then he laughed. "The Serpent-thing is the outer covering of the tyre on
one of our driving wheels," he explained. "And we're in luck because,
after that ghastly road it isn't the tyre itself. This is nothing; I'll
tear it off, and the good old tyre's so sound that we can go on with its
skin off, until Bellagio, when I'll put on a new one before we start
again. It has cracked the mud guard in its gyrations, though fortunately
not enough to make it unsafe for the luggage."

In about three minutes we were teuf-teufing on once more; but we hadn't
been going for ten minutes when, half-way up a hill, the motor gave a
weary sigh, and moved languidly, as if it were very tired and
discouraged, yet trying its best to obey. We were on the outskirts of a
village called Erba, and the automobile crawled on until it saw a little
inn, with a lot of peasants sitting in the cool shade of an arbour,
drinking wine; there it stopped, which was wonderfully intelligent of
it.

"The poor animal wants water after