The unheralded things, the things which the guide-books do not talk about, are sometimes so charming. I found it entrancing to descend of a morning by lovely, cool, stone passages from the Piazza of Vittorio Emanuele to the Piazza of the Army, and watch the soldiers, principally cavalry, drill. Their ground was a space about five acres in extent, as flat as a table, set high above the plain, with deep ravines descending on either hand, and the quaint houses and public institutions of Perugia looking down from above. To the left, as you looked out over the plain, across the intervening ravine, was another spur of the town, built also on a flat ridge with the graceful church of St. Peter and its beautiful Italian-Gothic tower, and the whole road that swept along the edge of the cliff, making a delightful way for carriages and automobiles. I took delight in seeing how wonderfully the deep green ravines separate one section of the town from another, and in watching the soldiers, Italy then being at war with Tripoli. You could stand, your arms resting upon some old brownish-green wall, and look out over intervening fields to distant ranges of mountains, or tower-like Assisi and Spoleto. The variety of the coloring of the plain below was never wearying. This Italian valley was so beautiful that I should like to say one more word about the skies and the wonderful landscape effects. North of here, in Florence, Venice and Milan, they do not occur so persistently and with such glorious warmth at this season of the year. At this height the nights were not cold, but cool, and the mornings burst with such a blaze of color as to defy the art of all save the greatest painters. They were not so much lurid as richly spiritualized, being shot through with a strange electric radiance. This did not mean, as it would so often in America, that a cloudy day was to follow. Rather the radiance slowly gave place to a glittering field of light that brought out every slope and olive orchard and distant cypress and pine with amazing clearness. The bells of the churches in Perugia and in the valley below were like muezzins calling to each other from their praying-towers. As the day closed the features of the landscape seemed to be set in crystal, and the greens and browns and grays to have at times a metallic quality. Outside the walls in the distance were churches, shrines, and monasteries, always with a cypress or two, sometimes with many, which stood out with great distinctness, and from distant hillsides you would hear laborers singing in the bright sun. Well might they sing, for I know of no place where life would present to them a fairer aspect. CHAPTER XXXVII THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE