We were speeding through Tuscany, and the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards clasped hands and danced along with us. The sky would have told us we were in Italy if we had come on a magic carpet without a compass or a time-table. Poppa says we are not, under any circumstances, to mention it more than once, but that we might as well explode the fallacy that there is anything like it in America. There isn't. Our cerulean is very beautifully blue, but in Italy one discovers by contrast that it is an intellectual blue, filled with light, high, provocative. The sky that bends over Tuscany is the very soul of blue, deep, soft, intense, impenetrable--the sky that one sees in those little casual bits of landscape behind the shoulders of pre-Raphaelite Saints and Madonnas; and here and there a lake, giving it back with delight, and now and then the long slope of a hill, with an old yellow-walled town creeping up, castle crowned, and raggedly trimmed with olives; and so many ruins that the Senator, summoned by momma to look at the last in view, regarded it with disparagement, which he did not attempt to conceal. He wondered, he said, that the Italian Government wasn't ashamed of having such a lot of them. They might be picturesque, but they weren't creditable; they gave you the impression that the country was on the down grade. "You needn't call my attention to any more of them, Augusta," he added; "but if you see any building that looks like progress, now, anything that gives you the idea of modern improvements inside, I shouldn't like to miss it." And he returned to the thirty-second page of the Sunday _New York World_. "I sometimes wish," said momma, "that I were not the only person in this family with the artistic temperament." Sometimes we stopped at the little yellow towns and saw quite closely their queer old defences and belfrys and clock towers, and guessed at the pomegranates and oleanders behind their high courtyard walls. They had musical names, even in the mouths of the railway guards, who sang every one of them with a high note and a full octave on the syllable of stress--"Rosign_a_no!" "Car_m_iglia!" The Senator was fascinated with the spectacle of a railway guard who could express himself intelligibly, to say nothing of the charm; he spoke of introducing the system in the United States, but we tried it on "New York," "Washington," "Kansas City," and it didn't seem the same.