hand—this way toward the Ema, that way
toward the Arno.

Close, here in the foreground, is a tiny
church with a low campanile, or bell-tower,
on its roof. It is the church of Saint John
in Jerusalem. But the neighbouring
peasants know it by no other name than San
Gersolé, that being the popular contraction
of the ten syllables necessary to the
pronunciation of San Giovanni in
Gerusalemme. In front of the church lies the
little piazzetta, bounded on the side opposite
to the church-door by a low parapet wall,
and entirely surrounded by huge cypresses.
Beyond this parapet what a dream of
purple hills, veiled slightly here and there
by a silvery gauze of hot mist! What a
widening plain, ever widening toward the
sea, that is green near at hand, and then
in the distance bluish-grey, and holds Arno,
sleepily flowing on his course, brightening
it with rare gleams reflected from the sky!
What a vision of a city, whose house-roofs
seem to press and throng like a holiday
crowd, and of an awful dome, and soaring
towers and spires, and churches and
palaces, and old arched gateways, showing
burnt and brown as colossal fragments of
Etruscan pottery! What a dazzling speck
of whiteness on the far horizon, that looks
like a wandering cloud, but is the jagged
line of the Carrara marble mountains many
a mile away! What a strange melancholy
charm as the eye explores the naked
Appenine, discrowned long ages of his rich regal
wreath of woods, rearing parched and
crumbling heights to the relentless sun,
and with black gashes of shadow where a
deep ravine winds its mysterious way into
the central stronghold of the hills! What
a waveless sea of azure air, into whose
limpid depths the very soul seems to plunge
and float as we gaze! And subtly steeping
all this in a flood of glory, what a divinely
terrible, divinely beneficent, dazzling, flaming,
white-hot sunshine!

Drought, and a sultry silence, shaking to
the shrill song of the cicala, as we stand
and gaze.

Suddenly a jangling bell breaks forth
discordantly. Up in the square campanile
of San Gersolé it is swinging in uneasy
jerks—ting-tang, ting-tang, jingle-jangle
jingle—without any rhythm.

Out of the dark little church comes a
procession. Two priests; boys in white
surplices swinging censers; men carrying
a lofty crimson banner bearing the painted
miracle of some saint; and some dozen or so
of peasant men and women (the latter
largely predominating) in holiday attire,
carrying missals, and shouting forth a
Latin hymn in a quaint, monotonous chant.
Round the little piazza they march
solemnly, sending up curling clouds of
incense into the leafy darkness of the
cypresses, and jealously edging on to every
inch of shade as they walk slowly,
bare-headed, under the summer sky. Once,
twice, three times, they make the circuit of
the piazza. Then the dark church door
swallows them again. The bell ceases to
jangle, and the last whiff of incense floats
away into the air.

Standing with San Gersolé on the left,
and the parapet wall on the right, and
looking straight before us, whither does the
road lead?

"Nowhither," answers an old contadino,
who has been tending his cows in a shed
close at hand. Cows know no difference
between work days and feast days; but
need their fodder and litter all the same,
though it be the festa of the saint whose
legend is commemorated on the crimson
banner. Therefore the old contadino has
been tending them, with a large apron
made of coarse blue linen tied over his
holiday clothes. And if you ask him again
whither the road leads, he will still answer
"nowhither." You do not "come out," he
says; the road leads nowhither, save—as
if you press him hard with questions he
will be driven to tell you—to the extreme
edge of the precipice that overhangs the
valley of the Ema.

But is there nothing, then, between San
Gersolé and the edge of the precipice, save
a strip of road leading nowhither? Ah,
truly, yes: there is a garden; a large
garden. And there is a house; a large
house; the Villa Chiari. Oh, yes, as to
that; yes, yes. But the road—what would
you?—leads nowhither.

Proceeding along it, nevertheless, we
reach a forlorn-looking, grass-grown space.
The grass is burnt straw-colour, and a
footpath is worn across it. The footpath shows
the bare brown earth beaten and baked
quite hard. Across it streams an endless
procession of big black ants—as zealously
busy a crowd pressing importantly along
the road that "leads nowhither," as you
shall ever have seen even in Fleet-street,
London City. No other living thing is to
be beheld, not even a butterfly; but the
cicala still springs his tiny steel rattle in
the sultry silence.

Before us is a high wall, whose plaster
is crumbling and peeling off. There are