me a silent and profound vale,
hung with enormous woods, and sloping upwards to where it was closed
by a high bank beneath and between two peaks. This bank I knew could
be nothing else than the central ridge of the Apennines, the
watershed, the boundary of Tuscany, and the end of all the main part
of my journey. Beyond, the valleys would open on to the Tuscan Plain,
and at the southern limit of that, Siena was my mark; from Siena to
Rome an eager man, if he is sound, may march in three long days. Nor
was that calculation all. The satisfaction of the last lap, of the
home run, went with the word Tuscany in my mind; these cities were the
approaches and introduction of the end.

When I had slept out the heat, I followed the woods upward through the
afternoon. They stood tangled and huge, and the mosses under them were
thick and silent, because in this last belt of the mountains height
and coolness reproduced the north. A charcoal burner was making his
furnace; after that for the last miles there was no sound. Even the
floor of the vale was a depth of grass, and no torrent ran in it but
only a little hidden stream, leafy like our streams at home.

At last the steep bank, a wall at the end of the valley, rose
immediately above me. It was very steep and bare, desolate with the
many stumps of trees that had been cut down; but all its edge and
fringe against the sky was the line of a deep forest.

After its laborious hundreds of feet, when the forest that crowned it
evenly was reached, the Apennines were conquered, the last great range
was passed, and there stood no barrier between this high crest and
Rome.

The hither side of that bank, I say, had been denuded of its trees;
the roots of secular chestnuts stood like graves above the dry steep,
and had marked my last arduous climb. Now, at the summit, the highest
part was a line of cool forest, and the late afternoon mingled with
the sanctity of trees. A genial dampness pervaded the earth beneath;
grasses grew, and there were living creatures in the shade.

Nor was this tenanted wood all the welcome I received on my entry into
Tuscany. Already I heard the noise of falling waters upon every side,
where the Serchio sprang from twenty sources on the southern slope,
and leapt down between mosses, and quarrelled, and overcame great
smooth dark rocks in busy falls. Indeed, it was like my own country in
the north, and a man might say to himself--'After so much journeying,
perhaps