emorate a treaty which was the cause of many wars. At the back of
the piazza, like the back-drop on a stage, rises a towering sugar-loaf
mound, thrown up, so they say, by Attila, that from it he might
conveniently watch the siege and burning of Aquileia. Perched atop
this mound, and looking for all the world like one of Maxfield
Parrish's painted castles, is the Castello, once the residence of the
Venetian and Austrian governors, and, rising above it, a white and
slender tower. If you will take the trouble to climb to the summit of
this tower you will find that the earth you left behind is now laid
out at your feet like one of those putty maps you used to make in
school. Below you, like a vast tessellated floor, is the Friulian
plain, dotted with red-roofed villages, checkerboarded with fields of
green and brown, stretching away, away to where, beyond the blue
Isonzo, the Julian and Carnic Alps leap skyward in a mighty, curving,
mile-high wall. You have the war before you, for amid those distant
mountains snakes the Austro-Italian battle-line. Just as Attila and
his Hunnish warriors looked down from the summit of this very mound,
fourteen hundred years ago, upon the destruction of the Italian
plain-towns, so to-day, from the same vantage-point, the Italians can
see their artillery methodically pounding to pieces the defenses of
the modern Huns. A strange reversal of history, is it not?

[Illustration: Alpini Going Into Action.
Their white uniforms make them almost indistinguishable against the
blinding expanses of snow.]

[Illustration: On the Roof of the World.
It not infrequently happens that the outposts on the higher peaks
are cut off by a heavy fall of snow and cannot be relieved until
the spring.]

Leaving on our right the Palazzo Civico, built two-score years before
Columbus set foot on the beach of San Salvador, we rolled through the
gateway in the ancient city wall, acknowledging the salute of the
steel-helmeted sentry just as the mail-clad knights who rode through
that same gateway to the fighting on the plain, long centuries ago,
doubtless acknowledged the salute of the steel-capped men-at-arms.
Down the straight white road we sped, between rows of cropped and
stunted willows, which line the highway on either side like soldiers
with bowed heads. It is a storied and romantic region, this Venetia,
whose fertile farm-lands, crisscrossed with watercourses, stretch
away, flat and brown