oarded the _vapore_ which, after an hour's steaming up the teeming
Guidecca and across the outlying lagoons, set us down at the road-head,
on the mainland, where young Captain Tron, of the Comando Supremo, was
awaiting us with a big gray staff-car. Captain Tron, who had been born
on the Riviera and spoke English like an Oxonian, had been aide-de-camp
to the Prince of Wales during that young gentleman's prolonged stay on
the Italian front. He was selected by the Italian High Command to
accompany us, I imagine, because of his ability to give intelligent
answers to every conceivable sort of question, his tact, and his
unfailing discretion. His chief weakness was his proclivity for
road-burning, in which he was enthusiastically abetted by our Sicilian
chauffeur, who, before attaining to the dignity of driving a staff-car,
had spent an apprenticeship of two years in piloting ammunition-laden
_camions_ over the narrow and perilous roads which led to the positions
held by the Alpini amid the higher peaks, during which he learned to
save his tires and his brake-linings by taking on two wheels instead of
four the hairpin mountain turns. Now I am perfectly willing to travel as
fast as any one, if necessity demands it, but to tear through a region
as beautiful as Venetia at sixty miles an hour, with the incomparable
landscape whirling past in a confused blur, like a motion-picture film
which is being run too fast because the operator is in a hurry to get
home, seems to me as unintelligent as it is unnecessary. Like all
Italian drivers, moreover, our chauffeur insisted on keeping his cut-out
wide open, thereby producing a racket like a machine-gun, which, though
it gave warning of our approach when we were still a mile away, made any
attempt at conversation, save by shouting, out of the question.

Because I wished to follow Italy's new frontiers from their very
beginning, at that point where the boundaries of Italy, Austria and
Switzerland meet near the Stelvio Pass, our course from Venice lay
northwestward, across the dusty plains of Venetia, shimmering in the
summer heat, the low, pleasant-looking villas of white or pink or
sometimes pale blue stucco, set far back in blazing gardens, peering
coyly out at us from between the ranks of stately cypresses which lined
the highway, like daintily-gowned girls seeking an excuse for a
flirtation. Dotting the Venetian plain are many quaint and charming
towns of whose existence the tourist, t