cheer. The accommodation and cuisine I found to be homely, but excellent; the people extraordinarily civil. Cortina, although commonplace in itself, lies in the centre of the grandest Dolomite scenery up and down the Ampezzo valley, and is most conveniently situated for excursions.

Hitherto all had fallen out to my wish, but now disappointment awaited me.  Picking up information along the road, I had intended taking horses at Cortina, and going over the mountains to Caprile by Monte Gusella, about seven hours distant.  The path is good, and not at all steep, following, as I was told, only the lower spurs of the heights. At Caprile there is a charming inn, in the very centre of the
most extraordinary scenery in and about Monte Cività and the whole of the Marmolata district, reached by horse-paths. I longed to leave the road and the eilwagen, and plunge again into the wild phantasmagoria of the mountains, but it was denied me. No horses could be had in Cortina at that time, it being rather late in the season, and they could not promise any either on the next or following days. Let those who desire to carry out such plans telegraph to Cortina, for, strange to say, there is a telegraph among these wilds following the postal road. From Cortina to Caprile, Agordo, and Bellerno, on foot or on horseback, is the shortest and easier route into the plains. But in the absence of horses, I was compelled to continue my journey next day, making a long détour by road, starting at nine in the morning by post-waggon, having booked myself direct to the rail at Conegliano. Here, in the broad Ampezzo valley, the peculiar features of the Dolomite scenery change, losing much of the stern and awful grandeur of the narrower passes. In an hour we found ourselves at the Austrian frontier, represented by an open gate painted black and yellow. The cross of Savoy, a dirtier but handsomer race of peasants, together with innumerable beggars, announced Italy. Passing Venas, where there is a very bad inn of the Italian pattern, the change from the clean and ample accommodation of the Tyrol is as sudden as unpalatable. The road winds for many and many a mile round the base of Monte Antalao, one of the loftiest of the Dolomites. Had I approached by the south instead of the north, and had this huge mountain, eleven thousand feet high, presented itself to me, standing apart, surrounded by its lesser satellites, it is possible I might recal it with greater admiration. But I had grown fastidious, and Antalao, with its magnificent pinnacles blazing with magic colours in the morning sun, seemed to me but a great landmark pointing to the wonder-land behind. Opposite to Mount Antalao, across the Ampezzo valley, is Mount Pelmo, its fellow-Cerberus, with tall, obelisk-shaped summit. These two portals passed, the mountains gradually dwarf, and, although many of their peculiar singularities are perpetually cropping out, and reasserting themselves as being of the same fantastic race, still, spite of these spasmodic efforts, Nature gradually reassumes her usual aspect.

Our road, still in the Ampezzo valley, follows the course of a river to the small village of Tai Cadorre, the birthplace of Titian, on to Pieve di Cadorre, on a high hill about a mile distant, for the due delivery of the post-bags which we carried.  Here the Ampezzo valley, properly so-called, ends, or rather amalgamates with another narrower pass (of Cadorre) continuing in the same eastward direction.  Cadorre, the residence of Titian, where his house still remains, guarded by a jealous proprietor, unwilling to gratify general curiosity, is a bright, airy little place, perched up midway on a mountain-side.  On a bluff, overhanging a deep glen, dark with woods, stands its ruined castle, and blind indeed must be those eyes, and little conversant with artistic matters, who do not recognise this bluff and this castle, with its scant and somewhat spiky firs, as having served Titian as a background in many a picture. Those mountains, which ignorant criticism has dared to censure as impossible, not only in his backgrounds, but in those of other Venetian artists, are nothing in the world but Dolomites, under whose shadows so many painters were born. So much has been written on the subject, that I cannot allow myself to expatiate on how the very shape of the stiff-larch fir-trees about Cadorre, stripped to the stem of their lower branches, and feathering out towards the tops, the villages crowning Dolomite excrescences, piled block upon block, like fortresses, the rich tints of the narrow valleys, shaded by chestnut woods, whose silvery trunks catch up the sunshine, all reminded me of "bits" by Titian.

A large portrait in fresco, under the town clock in the Piazza of Cadorre, recals him, clothed in flowing robes of honour, brush in hand, to his fellow-citizens and the