Attempts have been made to find traces of this hospitable dwelling where the future monk of Thagaste and Hippo bade farewell to the world. Cassicium has disappeared. The imagination is free to rebuild it fancifully in any part of the rich country which lies about Milan. Still, if the youthful Licentius has not yielded too much to metaphor in the verses wherein he recalls to Augustin "Departed suns among Italian mountain-heights," it is likely that the estate of Verecundus lay upon those first mountain-slopes which roll into the Brianza range. Even to-day, the rich Milanese have their country houses among those hills. To Augustin and his companions this flourishing Lombardy must have seemed another promised land. The country, wonderfully fertile and cultivated, is one orchard, where fruit trees cluster, and, in all ways, deep streams wind, slow-flowing and stocked with fish. Everywhere is the tremor of running water--inconceivably fresh music for African ears. A scent of mint and aniseed; fields with grass growing high and straight in which you plunge up to the knees. Here and there, deeply engulfed little valleys with their bunches of green covert, slashed with the rose plumes of the lime trees and the burnished leaves of the hazels, and where already the northern firs lift their black needles. Far off, blended in one violet mass, the Alps, peak upon peak, covered with snow; and nearer in view, sheer cliffs, jutting fastnesses, ploughed through with black gorges which make flare out plainer the bronze-gold of their slopes. Not far off, the enchanted lakes slumber. It seems that an emblazonment fluctuates from their waters, and writhing above the crags which imprison them drifts athwart a sky sometimes a little chill--Leonardo's pensive sky of shadowed amethyst--again of a flushed blue, whereupon float great clouds, silken and ruddy, as in the backgrounds of Veronese's pictures. The beauty of the light lightens and beautifies the over-heavy opulence of the land.