In the year 1858 I was staying the greater part of the summer at Bellinzona, during a drought as harmful as the storms of ten years later. The Ticino sank into a green rivulet; and not having seen the right way to deal with the matter, I had many a talk with the parroco of a little church whose tower I was drawing, as to the possibility of setting his peasants to work to repair the embankment while the river was low. But the good old priest said, sorrowfully, the peasants were too jealous of each other, that no one would build anything or protect his own ground for fear his work might also benefit his neighbors. But the people of Bellinzona are Swiss, not Italians. I believe the Roman and Sienese races, in different ways, possess qualities of strength and gentleness far more precious than the sunshine and rain upon their mountains, and, hitherto, as cruelly lost. It is in them that all the real power of Italy still lives; it is only by them, and by what care, and providence, and accordant good-will ever be found in them, that the work is to be done, not by money; though, if money were all that is needed, do we in England owe so little to Italy of delight that we cannot so much as lend her spades and pick-axes at her need? Would she trust us? Would her government let us send over some engineer officers and a few sappers and miners, and bear, for a time, with an English instead of a French "occupation" of her barrenest hills? But she does not need us. Good engineers she has, and has had many since Leonardo designed the canals of Lombardy. Agriculturists she has had, I think, among her gentlemen a little before there were gentlemen farmers in England; something she has told us of agriculture, also, pleasantly by the reeds of Mincio and among the apple-blossoms wet with Arno. Her streams have learned obedience before now: Fonte Branda and the Fountain of Joy flow at Sienna still; the rivulets that make green the slopes of Casentino may yet satisfy true men's thirst. "Where is the money to come from?" Let Italy keep her souls pure, and she will not need to alloy her florins. The only question for her is whether still the mossy rock and the "rivus aquæ" are "in rotis" or rather the racecourse and the boulevard--the curses of England and of France.