How much our Italy of Rome and Naples owes to the Apennines! How gratefully should lovers of romance and history regard that mighty chain that runs, an inland sea of crag and peak, forest and ravine, between shore and shore! Physically and morally, it is the backbone of the country, the fortress of tradition, the nurse of what our modern cant calls “plain living and high thinking.” Its hard yet beneficent climate, with sharp delimitations of season, its passes so obdurate to the tainting allurements of railways, its hundreds of sturdy self-contained little towns, each with its story of its own saints and heroes, its ancestry of tradition that laughs at the flight of centuries—all this has bred a race of men and women of whom modern Italy knows little, but who form the residue by which the mixed enfeebled masses of her cities and plains will in the end be saved. Faith is strong; morals, though often transgressed, still clear and commanding. New fads, make-believe religions, free love and race-suicide presented as twin benefits to humanity, the worship of materialism—all the old crimes that come dressed up as new virtues—find no foothold here. The “pale pink uplift” of these modern shams would be laughed to scorn by our people of Sabina and Abruzzi and Ciocciarìa. Their parish priests tramp round amongst them as friends and mentors. The _parroco_ and the apothecary may be the only persons in a whole community who can read, but the child of ten knows the commandments of God and the Church, and the innovator who attempts to make little 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.