An American I met on the boat coming home told me he failed to take such precautions while traveling in Italy; and he said that when he reached the Swiss border his trunk was so light he had to sit on it to keep it from blowing off the bus on the way from the station to the hotel, and so empty that when he opened it at both ends the draft whistling through it gave him a bad cold. However, he may have exaggerated slightly. If you can forget that you are paying first-class prices for fourth-rate accommodations--forget the dirt in the carriages and the smells in the compartments--a railroad journey through the Italian Peninsula is a wonderful experience. I know it was a wonderful experience for me. I shall not forget the old walled towns of stone perched precariously on the sloping withers of razorbacked mountains--towns that were old when the Saviour was born; or the ancient Roman aqueducts, all pocked and pecked with age, looping their arches across the land for miles on miles; or the fields, scored and scarified by three thousand years of unremitting, relentless, everlasting agriculture; or the wide-horned Italian cattle that browsed in those fields; or yet the woman who darted to the door of every signal-house we passed and came to attention, with a long cudgel held flat against her shoulder like a sentry's musket. I do not know why a woman should exhibit an overgrown broomstick when an Italian train passes a flag station, any more than I know why, when a squad of Paris firemen march out of the engine house for exercise, they should carry carbines and knapsacks. I only know that these things are done. In Tuscany the vineyards make a fine show, for the vines are trained to grow up from the ground and then are bound into streamers and draped from one fruit tree or one shade tree to another, until a whole hillside becomes one long, confusing vista of leafy festoons. The thrifty owner gets the benefit of his grapes and of his trees, and of the earth below, too, for there he raises vegetables and grains, and the like. Like everything else in this land, the system is an old one. I judge it was old enough to be hackneyed when Horace wrote of it: Now each man, basking on his slopes, Weds to his widowed tree the vine; Then, as he gayly quaffs his wine, Salutes thee god of all his hopes. Classical quotations interspersed here and there are wonderful helps to a guide book, don't you think? In rural Italy there are two other scenic details that strike the American as being most curious--one is the amazing prevalence of family washing, and the other is the amazing scarcity of birdlife. To himself the traveler says: "What becomes of all this intimate and personal display of family apparel I see fluttering from the front windows of every house in this country? Everybody is forever washing clothes but nobody ever wears it after it is washed. And what has become of all the birds?"