As this advice exactly coincided with our own inclinations, we naturally considered it the wisest of all, especially as the invitation to bear-hunts and glacier-scrambles was not particularly tempting to our party. The kind reader will perceive this for himself when he learns that it consisted of an English writer, who, still hale and hearty in spite of his threescore years and ten, regarded botany as the best rural sport; his wife, his faithful companion through many years of sunshine and shadow, who had grown old so naturally that whilst anticipating a joyful Hereafter she still clothed this present life with the poetic hues of her girlhood; their daughter, the present narrator; and their joint friend, another Margaret, who, whilst loyal to her native country, America, had created for herself, through her talent, her love of true work and her self-dependence, a bright social and artistic life in Italy. As for Perugia, our happy quartette had plenty of opportunities for studying the old masters in the winter months. Now we were anxious to exchange the oppressive, leaden air of the Italian summer for the invigorating breezes of the Alps. Yet how fresh and graceful Italy still looked as we traveled northward in the second week of June! The affluent and at the same time gentle sunshine streamed through the broad green leaves of the vines, which were flung in elegant festoons from tree to tree. It intensified the bright scarlet of the myriad poppies, which glowed amongst the brilliant green corn. It lighted up the golden water-lilies lying on the surface of the slowly-gliding streams, and brought into still greater contrast the tall amber-colored campanile or the black cypress grove cut in sharp outline against the diaphanous blue sky. We knew, however, that fever could lurk in this very luxury of beauty, while health was awaiting us in the more sombre scenes of gray mountain and green sloping pasture. We traveled on, therefore, by the quickest and easiest route, and alighting from the express-train to Munich at the Brixen station on the Brenner Pass, were shortly deposited, bag and baggage, at that comfortable and thoroughly German inn, the renowned Elephant.