"Perhaps it will lift," Jim says, with a sort of dismal unlikely hopefulness as he strains his eyes, trying to look down the straight solemn fir aisles, with their files upon files of tall stems, that seem to be seen only as if through a thick gauze. Neither of his companions has the spirit necessary to echo the supposition. The road winds endlessly, steeper and steeper up through the mist. The tired horses step wearily, and the unfortunate pleasure-seekers are beginning to think that the muffled monotony of firs, of winding road, of painfully labouring horses, will never end, when the vetturino turns round with a smile on his fog-wet face, and says, "Vallombrosa!" Under other circumstances, the announcement might have been cheering, might have excited a poetic curiosity; but as it is, the hood of the vehicle--necessarily raised some miles back--is so far poked forward that nothing is to be seen but a pour of rain--the rain has begun to descend in torrents--a glass-door in a house-wall opening to admit them, and a waiter holding up a green umbrella to protect their descent. Neither he nor the landlord, nor yet the chambermaid, show any signs of mirth or wonder at their arrival among the clouds on such a day. They are used to mad Inglese. And amongst the mad Inglese themselves there is certainly no temptation to mad merriment. On such an occasion there is nothing to do but eat, so they lunch dismally in a long, bare dining-room, with a carpetless floor, a table laid for a grossly improbable number of guests, and a feeling of searching cold. Having spun out their scanty meal to the utmost limits of possibility, and washed it down with the weakest red wine that ever lived in a wicker bottle, they pass into a funereal _salon_, to which the waiter invites them. Someone makes the cheering announcement that they have as yet been here only half an hour, and that the horses must have two full hours to bait before there can be any question of beginning the return journey. And then they amble about the room, looking at the dreadful lithographs of Italy's plain King and fair Queen on the walls; at the venerable journals and gaudy English storybook, so dull as to have been forgotten by its owner, on the table. Their spirits are not heightened by a pervading sense as of being in a cellar, minus the wine. The equipment of this pleasant apartment is completed by a half-dead nosegay of what must once have been charming mountain blossoms. The sight decides them. They must go out. Perhaps even through this opaque cloud they may dimly see the mountain flowers growing, the mountain brooks dashing, which John Milton has told them that-- "the Etrurian shades, High over-arch'd imbower."