them on every side and went by the name of _Insula Romana_. The final drainage of the lake was not completed till some time in 1400, when the river Chiagio burst through the rocky dykes under Torgiano and lowered the level of the water by four metres. Thus central Umbria at last assumed its present aspect. We stand upon the hill-top at Perugia where once thousands of years ago the turbid waters of the Tiber rushed along, and at our feet stretch the green and fertile fields of Umbria, all the fairer for the fertilising waters of that mighty lake which, in the dim and distant past, had covered them completely." We have no definite date or name for those first men who came to live in this strange marshy wilderness. We have only the relics of their patient industry. An inexhaustible store of arrow-heads and other barbarous stone implements is found in all the hills around Perugia, and splendid hatchet heads of jade upon the shores of Trasimene. No doubt these men lived in holes and caves, perhaps at the foot of this hill where the present city of Perugia stands, or a little to the west of it, but their history is dark and very far away. Dark too and far away, as far as written facts remain, is the history of that almost more mysterious race of men which followed on the prehistoric one, namely, the Etruscans. This is no place in which to discuss the origin of that extraordinary people whose language and parentage, though they lived and laboured side by side with the most cultivated and inquisitive of European nations, is practically dead to us. It is enough at this point of our history to note that the Etruscans were the first to seal their personality, with the seal of a visible and tangible intelligence, upon this corner of the world, and it is quite probable that they made one of their earliest colonies upon the jutting spur of a line of hills which would have attracted them upon arrival. It is certain that in course of time Perugia became one of the most powerful cities of the Etruscan league. Her museums are full of the pottery, tombs, inscriptions, toys, and coins of the mysterious nation (see Museum, chapter XI.). Innumerable myths grew up around the foreign people, and individual historians described their advent in individual places and pretty much at random. The earliest chroniclers of Perugia, ignoring the men who had perhaps existed for centuries before this unknown nation landed,--ignoring too, the other settlers,--pounced upon a plum so precious and romantic to stick into the pie of legends that they were concocting; they [Illustration: VIA DEL AQUEDOTTO, SHOWING TOWER OF THE CATHEDRAL]