But in this my first journey to Italy, I was sufficiently happy in finding the Splügen prescribed for me as on the whole the most convenient mode of reaching in succession all the spots which had most special interest for me. My scheme was to make myself fairly well acquainted with some of the most interesting Italian cities north of the Apennines, and for this purpose to descend from the Splügen on Bergamo, and from thence to go on to Venice, halting as often as necessary by the way, and then to return by Mantua, Cremona, and Pavia, or by Ferrara, Bologna, Parma, and Piacenza to Milan, and so home. And railways, if they have made the journey somewhat more easy than it was, and have deprived it now and then of the charm which always attends the recollection of impediments and difficulties on the road, have not in any way altered the advantages of such a route for those whose tastes are at all akin to those which I carried abroad with me in those days, and carry still with undiminished strength. Whether, however, one enters Italy by one pass or another, the first part of one’s journey is by the well-worn road to Paris, which, by reason, I suppose, of its being the prelude to nearly every holiday tour that I make, never seems to be stale, old, or too well-known. There is something very novel, and it strikes me more every time it is seen, in the aspect of everything directly you have crossed the Channel; indeed, there is no country in Europe so much as France, and no city, perhaps, so much as Paris, which strikes an Englishman as being foreign in its aspect, and new in all its customs and proceedings. The dress of every one, the arrangements of the railways, the harnessing and character of the horses, the mode of life in hotels, and the ordinary habits and pleasant traits of the middle classes are all quite fresh to the English eye. Nor is the aspect of the country less so: fields cut up into small strips of a dozen kinds of crops; unprosperous-looking cows, each feeding discontentedly and drearily, tethered to a man or woman on a small patch of grass; corn cut and then stacked in small cocks for a month or two of exposure to the pleasant changes of the atmosphere; and the entire absence of hedge-rows and other trees than poplars, all go to make up a thoroughly un-English picture.