The morning was delicious, everything washed clean and fresh by the plentiful shower. A light, pearly cloud covered the sky, veiling all with a delicate softness that was to sunshine as contentment is to joy. Here and there a deep shadow slept on the landscape. Our little party took possession of a first-class car, and seated, each at a corner of it, were every moment calling attention to some new beauty. Isabel glanced with delight along the great aqueduct lines and the pictures they framed, all blurred and swimming with the birds with which the stone arches were alive; Bianca watched the mountain, her eyes full of poetical fancies; and Mr. Vane presently fell in love with a square of solid green he espied in the midst of the bare Campagna, a little paradise, where the trees and flowers seemed to be bursting with luxuriance over the walls, and regarding with astonishment the dead country about them, that stretched off its low waves and undulations in strong and stubborn contrast with that redundant spot. “Aladdin’s lamp must have done it,” he said; and after a moment added, having followed the subject a little in his own mind: “I am inclined to think that one element of the picturesque must be inconsistency. Ah! here are your white Campagna cattle we have heard so much about. Aren’t they of rather a bluish color?” “But look and see what they are eating, papa,” Bianca said. “No wonder it turns them blue.” The ground all about was deeply colored with blue flowers, in the midst of which these large, white cattle wandered, feeding lazily, as if eating were a pleasure, not a necessity. They were like people reading poetry. “We do not often have such a day here,” the Signora said, “and to me the clouds are a luxury. I own that I have sometimes grown weary of seeing that spotless blue overhead week after week, month after month, even. Clouds are tender, and give infinite lights and shades. The first winter I spent in Rome there were a hundred days in succession of windless, cloudless, golden weather, beginning in October, and lasting till after New Year’s day. Then came a sweet three days’ rain, which enchanted me. I went out twice a day in it.”