"All Tuesday I spent examining what was on board the _Elba_, and trying to start the repairs of the Spartivento land line, which has been entirely neglected--and no wonder, for no one has been paid for three months, no, not even the poor guards who have to keep themselves, their horses and their families, on their pay. Wednesday morning, I started for Spartivento, and got there in time to try a good many experiments. Spartivento looks more wild and savage than ever, but is not without a strange deadly beauty: the hills covered with bushes of a metallic green with coppery patches of soil in between; the valleys filled with dry salt mud and a little stagnant water; where that very morning the deer had drunk, where herons, curlews, and other fowl abound, and where, alas! malaria is breeding with this rain. (No fear for those who do not sleep on shore.) A little iron hut had been placed there since 1858; but the windows had been carried off, the door broken down, the roof pierced all over. In it we sat to make experiments; and how it recalled Birkenhead! There was Thomson, there was my testing-board, the strings of gutta-percha; Harry P---- even battering with the batteries; but where was my darling Annie? Whilst I sat, feet in sand, with Harry alone inside the hut--mats, coats, and wood to darken the window--the others visited the murderous old friar, who is of the order of Scaloppi, and for whom I brought a letter from his superior, ordering him to pay us attention; but he was away from home, gone to Cagliari in a boat with the produce of the farm belonging to his convent. Then they visited the tower of Chia, but could not get in because the door is thirty feet off the ground; so they came back and pitched a magnificent tent which I brought from the _Bahiana_ a long time ago--and where they will live (if I mistake not) in preference to the friar's or the owl- and bat-haunted tower. MM. T---- and S---- will be left there: T---- an intelligent, hard-working Frenchman with whom I am well pleased; he can speak English and Italian well, and has been two years at Genoa. S---- is a French German with a face like an ancient Gaul, who has been sergeant-major in the French line, and who is, I see, a great, big, muscular _faineant_. We left the tent pitched and some stores in charge of a guide, and ran back to Cagliari.