of these meets with a very cold reception. The people have many faults and many weaknesses, but they are all human ones, and, frankly, I would rather have to do with the man who has slain a rival or a sweetheart in a fit of jealous anger than with a railway magnate or a prophet of the Decadent. The murderer’s record is probably a good deal cleaner than theirs. So my inheritance of Sabina has always been very precious to me. Many weary years have passed since I set foot there, but the remembrance of young days spent in those high rich solitudes comes still as a fresh breeze across the dusty wastes of the world, and very gladly shall I return to them before I die. I have travelled so far and seen such strange and endless varieties of scenery that I think I have a right to say that there are few places on earth where nature has done more to rejoice and strengthen the body and soul of man. From Rome the Sabines are merely a noble chain of peaks, culminating in the calm Lion profile of the couchant “Lionessa,” her face to the north, waiting through the long blue days of summer for the crown of snow that the winter lays on her brow. The slopes and spurs that descend towards the Campagna are smiling enough—as they should be, turned everlastingly to the sun and the sea. One must pass beyond all that, climb by rough and narrow paths to the great tossed heart of the hills, and stand on some peak like Guadognolo to take in the amazing grandeur of the Sabines. Even from lower places—Olevano, for instance—you may look east and west and south and north, and feel as if you were standing on an island crag in an ocean of long sapphire billows rolling away, breaker beyond breaker, into infinity, a sea that in some moment of surpassing pride raised its breast too near the sky and froze to stone in that passion of ambition; and your heart, the heart of the native-born, tells you that every hollow between the breakers holds its rivers and lakes smothered in olives and vines and corn, its walled town and ancient Church, its old fortified farmhouses, dazzlingly white against the sun-warmed rock of the mounting ridge—farmhouses with broad brick loggias garlanded with festoons of scarlet and orange, the bursting red “pepperoni” as big as citrons, and strings of flame-coloured maize like golden spear-heads, all drying in the sun for the winter’s needs.