full-fed stream as it is, is only a conventional
boundary for the separation of Austrian from
Sardinian territory. There is a gradual transition
from the upland to the dead level flat; as
you proceed eastward, the framework of
mountains opens wider, and at last disappears from
view; the panorama ceases to be encircled
by a chain of hills, or is encircled only by
blue and misty hill-tops peeping up in the
distance here and there; the Po, swollen by ever-
increasing contributions, grows bigger, deeper,
and heavier in his pace, but nowhere handsomer.
Nowhere does he answer to his title of the
"king of rivers," which should be changed to
that of the monster drain, highly valuable to
agriculture, but useless as regards the
picturesque. The Po himself adds to the
oneness and continuity of the land. Call the
western half of Northern Italy Upper Pied-
mont, and the eastern half Lower Piedmont,
and every geographical exigence is satisfied.

What Upper Piedmont lacks, to complete its
beauty, is a fair sheet of water; for Lago
Maggiore is only a frontier lake. But the wide, wide
plain, visible from every brow and cliff of the
hills, is itself by turns a lake, a sea, a forest, or
a garden; and when the light, gauze-like, ash-
coloured morning mist lies gently heaving and
subsiding upon it, no stretch of imagination is
required to fancy that it hides the surface of a
broad expanse of the purest water. The plain
is wide; but, unlike the even flats of
Lombardy, the level land of Piedmont is nowhere too
wide. From the terrace of Castellamonte—a
castle perched scarcely five hundred feet above
the level ground, on the very toe of this great
mountain foot of Piedmont—you can behold
Turin and its eminences, backed by the endless
range of the Montferrat hills, as if they were
only an hour's short walk away, though the
nearest distance across is full five-and-twenty
English miles. You see the craggy pinnacle of
Monte Viso, with all the stupendous jagged
chain of the Maritime Alps, distinctly carved
in the dark deep azure of the Italian sky,
yet enhanced, heightened, and made weird
and spectral, by the almost imperceptible
film ot the summer haze. You walk round to
the other platform of the castle, and look to the
north and west, and behold the broad valleys of
the Orco, the Locana, the Soana, and the Ceresola,
teeming with a luxuriance of unbroken
green, closed in by the brown, bare, bleak
mountain-walls, encompassing the rugged shield
of Italy—all ragged, and steep, and
precipitous, tipped here and there with the snowy
crests, the prodigious maze of bold outlines,
heaped up in mighty confusion, laid out
like stage decorations, dotted with hamlets,
castles, and convents at great heights; and,
higher still, the white walls of lonely chapels or
sanctuaries, where, on spots once sacred to
the god Pan, pilgrims now pay their yearly
worship to our Lady of the Snow, or to St.
Bernard of Aosta, the Apostle of the Alps.*

* See Antonio Gallenga's spirited and graphic
Country Life in Piedmont.

The exuberant fertility of both Upper and
Lower Piedmont is due to the alluvial soil
brought down by the mountain brooks, of which
soil in fact, the whole of the level country is
composed. It is the mud of the Nile, not
annually deposited in a scanty layer, but long ago
stored in cubical and substantial solidity, so
that the staple, as farmers call it, is of a depth
to be measured by yards, if it can be measured
at all. Plants notorious for exhausting the
land grow here, year after year, without check
or stint, or any necessity for manure. Hemp
attains a stature whose altitude we know,
because we have seen it, but which we will
not mention, because to be suspected of
exaggeration is unpleasant. But even the luxuriant
vegetation tends to make warfare more
difficult and dangerous. Tyrolese riflemen,
crouching amongst the wheat and other growing
crops, have done more mischief to the French
and Sardinian troops than the cannon of the
Austrians, by picking off the officers and decimating
the ranks, while they themselves offer no
mark to be aimed at.

In such a country, and on such land, military
movements are dependent on the weather in
as great a degree as agricultural operations
would be. On a rich, deep, adhesive, alluvial
soil, when the barometer obstinately points to
"Much Rain," marches become impossible,
which would be easy if it rose to " Set Fair."
Artillery cannot stir in mud. Rain raises obstacles
which no courage or perseverance can
conquer: not to mention rivers overflowing their
banks in consequence of the melting of Alpine
snows, or roads purposely broken up and
encumbered by the enemy. An army, above all,
must travel prudently; and not set one
inconsiderate step in a country where, or at a time when,
it may stick fast in the mud, and may be hemmed
in and entrapped by the sudden rise of rivers.

The very richness of Lombardy produces a
certain monotony in the landscape, which in
time becomes wearisome to the traveller. Everywhere
the picture is composed of the same
elements, slightly varying in their arrangement
only. You are obliged to excite your attention
by an effort, in order to notice some insignificant
town which has been rendered famous by some
deed of arms. Again; some deed of arms is
done, after you have passed through an insignificant
town, and your memory fails to
discriminate it from half a dozen other small
fellow-towns. The confusion is rendered
worse confounded by their all being sure to be
towns with bridges. But the deep, muddy,
weedy stream—which is, to the military man,
what ditch and rail are to the Leicestershire
hunter—has left no distinct impression on the
retina of your palled mind's eye. You cannot
remember whether it ran green pea-soup, or
yellow pea-soup, or brown gravy-soup, or unclarified
veal-broth. Was it the stream where you
saw the blue lizard run up the tree? Or the
stream where you heard grasshoppers chirp so
loudly? Or the stream which sent to market such
plentiful bunches of edible frogs which you saw