The drive to Roccadoro from Sant' Alessina is a pleasant drive. The road follows for the most part the windings of the Rampio, so that you are seldom out of sight of its gleaming waters, and the brawl of it, now louder, now less loud, is perpetually in your ears. To right and left you have the tender pink of blossoming almonds, with sometimes the scarlet flame of a pomegranate; and then the blue-grey hills, mantled in a kind of transparent cloth-of-gold, a gauze of gold, woven of haze and sunshine; and then, rosy white, with pale violet shadows, the snow-peaks, cut like cameos upon the brilliant azure of the sky. And sometimes, of course, you rattle through a village, with its crumbling, stained, and faded yellow-stuccoed houses, its dazzling white canvas awnings, its church and campanile, and its life that seems to pass entirely in the street: men in their shirt sleeves, lounging, smoking, spitting (else the land were not Italy!), or perhaps playing cards at a table under the leafless bush of the wine-shop; women gossiping over their needlework, or, gathered in sociable knots, combing and binding up their sleek black hair; children sprawling in the kindly dirt; the priest, biretta on head, nose in breviary, drifting slowly upon some priestly errand, and "getting through his office;" and the immemorial goatherd, bare-legged, in a tattered sugar-loaf hat, followed by his flock, with their queer anxious faces, blowing upon his Pan's-pipes (shrill strains, in minor mode and plagal scale, a music older than Theocritus), or stopping, jealously watched by the customer's avid Italian eyes, to milk "_per due centesimi_"--say, a farthing's worth--into an outstretched, close-clutched jug. Sometimes the almond orchards give place to vineyards, or to maize fields, or to dusky groves of walnut, or to plantations of scrubby oak where lean black pigs forage for the delectable acorn. Sometimes the valley narrows to a ravine, and signs of cultivation disappear, and the voice of the Rampio swells to a roar, and you become aware, between the hills that rise gloomy and almost sheer beside you, of a great solitude: a solitude that is intensified rather than diminished by the sight of some lonely--infinitely lonely--grange, perched far aloft, at a height that seems out of reach of the world. What possible manner of human beings, you wonder, can inhabit there, and what possible dreary manner of existence can they lead? But even in the most solitary places you are welcomed and sped on by a chorus of bird-songs. The hillsides resound with bird-songs continuously for the whole seven miles,--and continuously, at this season, for the whole four-and-twenty hours. Blackbirds, thrushes, blackcaps, goldfinches, chaffinches, sing from the first peep of dawn till the last trace of daylight has died out, and then the nightingales begin and keep it up till dawn again. And everywhere the soft air is aromatic with a faint scent of rosemary, for