But now forward, for the sun is in Leo, and in two hours he will be fierce. And behind the Tower of Miomo, towards the second pieve of Brando, the road ceases, and we must climb like the goat, for there are few districts in Cape Corso supplied with anything but footpaths. From the shore, at the lonely little Marina di Basina, I began to ascend the hills, on which lie the three communes that form the pieve of Brando. The way was rough and steep, but cheered by gushing brooks and luxuriant gardens. The slopes are quite covered with these, and they are full of grapes, oranges, and olives--fruits in which Brando specially abounds. The fig-tree bends low its laden branches, and holds its ripe fruit steadily to the parched mouth, unlike the tree of Tantalus. On a declivity towards the sea, is the beautiful stalactite cavern of Brando, not long since discovered. It lies in the gardens of a retired officer. An emigrant of Modena had given me a letter for this gentleman, and I called on him at his mansion. The grounds are magnificent. The Colonel has transformed the whole shore into a garden, which hangs above the sea, dreamy and cool with silent olives, myrtles, and laurels; there are cypresses and pines, too, isolated or in groups, flowers everywhere, ivy on the walls, vine-trellises heavy with grapes, oranges tree on tree, a little summer-house hiding among the greenery, a cool grotto deep under ground, loneliness, repose, a glimpse of emerald sky, and the sea with its hermit islands, a glimpse into your own happy human heart;--it were hard to tell when it might be best to live here, when you are still young, or when you have grown old. An elderly gentleman, who was looking out of the villa, heard me ask the gardener for the Colonel, and beckoned me to come to him. His garden had already shown me what kind of a man he was, and the little room into which I now entered told his character more and more plainly. The walls were covered with symbolic paintings; the different professions were fraternizing in a group, in which a husbandman, a soldier, a priest, and a scholar, were shaking hands; the five races were doing the same in another picture, where a European, an Asiatic, a Moor, an Australian, and a Redskin, sat sociably drinking round a table, encircled by a gay profusion of curling vine-wreaths. I immediately perceived that I was in the beautiful land of Icaria, and that I had happened on no other personage than the excellent uncle of Goethe's Wanderjahre. And so it was. He was the uncle--a bachelor, a humanistic socialist, who, as country gentleman and land-owner, diffused widely around him the beneficial influences of his own great though noiseless activity. He came towards me with a cheerful, quiet smile, the _Journal des Débats_ in his hand, pleased apparently with what he had been reading in it.