or the wide, stately, newer streets of
splendid shops (where they showed everything on earth except the Genoa
velvet I had always yearned to see on its native heath) turned to stare
at us. But oh, perhaps it was only because a girl was driving! Anyway,
the girl didn't disgrace herself. You would have been proud to see her
daringly steer down an old sloping causeway into the Garden of Eden--I
mean, the garden of our hotel. Anyway, the girl was proud of herself
when the Lightning Conductor said, "Brava! No one could have done that
better."

Brown was quite right about coming on to Genoa. It was a lovely hotel,
with quite a tropical garden that had a sort of private Zoo of its own;
jolly little beasts and birds in cages, which Aunt Mary and I fed next
morning, when we'd had a delicious rest after a long day. After an early
breakfast we went sight-seeing; and isn't the Campo Santo the very
quaintest thing you ever saw? I don't think I could have helped laughing
at some of the extraordinary marble ladies (with hoop skirts and
bustles, and embroidered granite ruffles, and stone roses in their
bonnets, kissing the hands of angel husbands with mutton-chop whiskers
and elastic-sided boots; or knocking at the doors of forbidding-looking
tombs, with Death as a sort of unliveried footman saying, "Not at
home") if it hadn't been for the mourners coming to visit their dead.
Oh, the pathos of them, with their sad, dark eyes, their heavy black
draperies, and the flowers they were bringing to tell their loved ones
that they were never forgotten! Instead of laughing, I came near crying.
But the two moods are often so near together that one makes mistakes in
their identity. The only fine and simple thing in the huge, strange
place was the tomb of Mazzini.

I was tremendously impressed with the harbour at Genoa. It seemed so
proud, as if Italy need have no shame to be represented by it, in the
presence of all the crowding ships from all the ports of the world.

The morning was still young and fair when we rushed away along the
Riviera di Levante; and even Aunt Mary was congratulating herself that
we were on an automobile and not a train. For a while our road ran side
by side with the rail; and whenever the coast was at its most exquisite,
with some jutting headland over which we could skim like a bird, the
wretched train had to go burrowing through the earth like a mole, all
the glory and beauty shut out in murky darkness. I counted abou