We took the route to Lodi, which is about twenty miles from Milan, the road lay the entire distance through meadows and vines. There was little other prospect than that of fertility, for we were in a sea of plain, though the Alps still lifted their hoary peaks along the northern horizon. South, east, and west, the sight was bounded with a fringe of fruit-trees, with, here and there, a gaunt church-tower thrusting up its neck, to mark the site of a village. There was, however, a good deal of irrigation, with canal-like ditches, among the meadows, and occasionally a broad margin of faded verdure around us. At Lodi we stopped two hours. The inn windows overlooked the market-place, which was teeming with the activity, gesticulation, bawling, humour, and wrangling of low Italian life. One fellow, mounted on a horse, was haranguing a crowd; and, leaning forward, I caught enough to discover that he was a quack dispensing immortality at very modest prices. Suddenly a peasant presented his face, when the fellow extracted a tooth, without dismounting. The operation was performed with great readiness, and, flourishing his prize in triumph, while the poor patient was holding his jaws and kicking right and left with pain, the fellow called on all around him to witness how slight a thing it was to lose a tooth. Observing great quantities of what I supposed to be small birds, beautifully white and clean, strung on coarse grass, I went down to examine them, thinking they might be some game of which it would be well to know more; but, on inspection they proved to be the hind quarters of frogs! There were hundreds of strings of them in the market. I know not how the French got their reputation of frog-eaters, unless it comes through the usual English prejudice; for I feel certain that ten frogs are consumed in Italy for one in France. Indeed, frogs are rather an unusual dish in Paris; nor do I remember ever to have seen them any where on a private table. The country around Lodi, however, is just suited to such a stock, and literally, thousands are consumed by the inhabitants.