So, one divine September morning we four rode forth, my dear mother almost crying at our temerity in facing the brigands who were then supposed to haunt the Eastern Hills. “Do bring back your ears with you!” was her parting recommendation, and I know that during the days of our absence she constantly dreaded receiving the grim packet of severed ears which the old-time brigands were in the habit of sending, with their little account for ransom, to the relatives of those they had captured. Years before, when we children were making expeditions from Rocca di Papa, we had, to our immense joy, been provided with big formidable-looking toy pistols, which we were enjoined to carry “in evidence”—so that the report might go about that the party was always strongly armed! The only brigand we ever caught sight of in our rambles through the lonely country would be an occasional outlaw who had escaped from the police to take hiding in the woods (where he was charitably maintained by his sympathising fellow-townsfolk) and who would scuttle away like a startled hare at the approach of a big party of young foreigners whose yells would probably reach to Rome itself if anybody interfered with them. The brigand of Romagna is, or was, a poor creature, very easily disposed of; his cousin in Calabria or Sicily is quite a different kind of person, a resolute, unscrupulous gentleman whom it is not at all pleasant to meet. In one of his Roman books, Mr. Hare speaks of the unearthly beauty of the Campagna and its surrounding hills in the first moments of the dawn, and deplores the fact that so many travellers come and go away again without ever having risen early enough to see it. I think dear Mr. Hare made the discovery late in life himself, for, if I remember rightly, it was during a journey of exploration that we made together somewhere that the fact struck him—and I and my sister regarded him then as distinctly middle-aged. My poor Annie was always a late riser, and vehemently deprecated the unripe hours of the morning, as she did every other kind of discomfort; but to me they were hours of purest romance, and seldom have they seemed more perfect than on the day when I and my three cavaliers rode away from Castel Gandolfo through the woods towards Genazzano (not Genzano) where we were to halt on our way to Palestrina. Have you ever ridden through deep chestnut woods when the sun is still so low that it only strikes the under branches of the trees, and creeps up their trunks like a rising bath of gold? When every dell is still a mist of cool emerald, and on the banks the level beams are kissing open the tightly whorled fronds of the fern, filling the tiny cups of the moss with topaz wine and turning its million-feathered spikelets into an upstanding frieze of fairy spears, each strung with a yellow pearl?