fortune and the Government favours. Thus, M. Jansoulet will be elected; and especially if he succeeds in his present undertaking, which has brought us here to the only inn of a little place called Pozzonegro (black well). It is a regular well, black with foliage, consisting of fifty small red-stone houses clustered round a long Italian church, at the bottom of a ravine between rigid hills and coloured sandstone rocks, over which stretch immense forests of larch and juniper trees. From my open window, at which I am writing, I see up above there a bit of blue sky, the orifice of the well; down below on the little square--which a huge nut-tree shades as though the shadows were not already thick enough--two shepherds clothed in sheep-skins are playing at cards, with their elbows on the stone of a fountain. Gambling is the bane of this land of idleness, where they get men from Lucca to do their harvesting. The two poor wretches I see probably haven’t a farthing between them, but one bets his knife against a cheese wrapped up in vine leaves, and the stakes lie between them on the bench. A little priest smokes his cigar as he watches them, and seems to take the liveliest interest in their game. And that is not all. Not a sound anywhere except the drops of water on the stone, the oaths of one of the players who swears by the _sango del seminaro_, and from underneath my room in the inn parlour the eager voice of our friend mingling with the sputterings of the illustrious Paganetti, who is interpreter, in his conversation with the not less illustrious Piedigriggio.