The wealthy Roman families, who have villas in the immediate vicinity of Rome, now leave the city to spend a month in them and breathe the fresh air of spring. Many and many a tradesman who is well to do in the world has a little _vigna_ outside the gates, where he raises vegetables and grapes and other fruits; and every _festa_-day you will be sure to find him and his family out in his little _villetta_, wandering about the grounds or sitting beneath his arbors, smoking and chatting with his children around him. His friends who have no villas of their own here visit him, and often there is a considerable company thus collected, who, if one may judge from their cheerful countenances and much laughter, enjoy themselves mightily. Knock at any of these villa-gates, and, if you happen to have the acquaintance of the owner, or are evidently a stranger of respectability, you will be received with much hospitality, invited to partake of the fruit and wine, and overwhelmed with thanks for your _gentilezza_ when you take your leave; for the Italians are a most good-natured and social people, and nothing pleases them better than a stranger who breaks the common round of topics by accounts of his own land. Everything new is to them wonderful, just as it is to a child. They are credulous of everything you tell them about America, which is to them in some measure what it was to the English in the days of Raleigh, Drake, and Hawkins, and say "_Per Bacco!_" to every new statement. And they are so magnificently ignorant, that you have _carte blanche_ for your stories. Never did I know any one staggered by anything I chose to say, but once. I was walking with my respectable old _padrone_, Nisi, about his little garden one day, when an ambition to know something about America inflamed his breast. "Are there any mountains?" he asked. I told him "Yes," and, with a chuckle of delight, he cried,-- "_Per Bacco!_ And have you any cities?" "Yes, a few little ones,"--for I thought I would sing small, contrary to the general "'Ercles vein" of my countrymen. He was evidently pleased that they were small, and, swelling with natural pride, said,-- "Large as Rome, of course, they could not be"; then, after a moment, he added, interrogatively, "And rivers, too,--have you any rivers?" "A few," I answered. "But not as large as our Tiber," he replied,--feeling assured, that, if the cities were smaller than Rome, as a necessary consequence, the rivers that flowed by them must be in the same category. The bait now offered was too tempting. I measured my respectable and somewhat obese friend carefully with my eye, for a moment, and then hurled this terrible fact at him:-- "We have some rivers three thousand miles long."