At night, in some little meager mountain town, we stroll about in the narrow passways, or wander under the heavy arches of the mountain churches. Shuffling old women grope in and out; dim lamps glimmer faintly at the side altars, shedding horrid light upon painted images of the dying Christ. Or, perhaps, to make the old pile more solemn, there stands some bier in the middle, with a figure or two kneeling at the foot, and ragged boys move stealthily under the shadows of the columns. Presently comes a young priest, in black robes, and lights a taper at the foot, and another at the head—for there is a dead man on the bier; and the parched, thin features look awfully under the yellow light of the tapers, in the gloom of the great building. It is very, very damp in the church, and the body of the dead man seems to make the air heavy, so we go out into the starlight again. In the morning, the western slopes wear broad shadows, and the frosts crumple, on the herbage, to our tread: across the valley, it is like summer; and the birds—for there are songsters in the Appenines—make summer music. Their notes blend softly with the faint sounds of some far-off convent bell, tolling for morning mass, and strike the frosted and shaded mountain side, with a sweet echo. As we toil on, and the shaded hills begin to glow in the sunshine, we pass a train of mules, loaded with wine. We have seen them an hour before—little black dots twining along the white streak of footway upon the mountain above us. We lost them as we began to ascend, until a wild snatch of an Appenine song turned our eyes up, and there, straggling through the brush, they appeared again; a foot slip would have brought the mules and wine casks rolling upon us. We keep still, holding by the brushwood, to let them pass. An hour more, and we see them toiling slowly—mule and muleteer—big dots and little dots—far down where we have been before. The sun is hot and smoking on them in the bare valleys; the sun is hot and smoking on the hill side, where we are toiling over the broken stones. I thought of little Enrica, when she said: “the spring was coming!” Time and again we sit down together—my friend and I—upon some fragment of rock, under the broad-armed chestnuts, that fringe the lower skirts of the mountains, and talk through the hottest of the noon, of the warriors of Sylla, and of the Sabine woman—but oftener—of the pretty peasantry, and of the sweet-faced Roman girl. He, too, tells me of his life and loves, and of the hopes that lie misty and grand before him: little did we think that in so few years, his hopes would be gone, and his body lying low in the Adriatic, or tossed with the drift upon the Dalmatian shores! Little did I think that here under the ancestral wood—still a wishful and blundering mortal, I should be gathering up the shreds that memory can catch of our Appenine wandering, and be weaving them into my bachelor dreams.