THE NEW ITALY 309 



passed. This battle with the mountain streams makes the tillage of the Ital- 

 ian alluvial plains a costly matter costlier than the Hollanders' fight with 

 the sea. The root of the difficulty lies in the want of protecting forests in the 

 hills. The rocks are soft and break to pieces rapidly, there being no mat of 

 roots to hold them fast; while they are decaying into soil they are tumbled 

 down by the floods in such masses that they gorge the river channels. . . . 

 It will take centuries of forethoughtful labor to restore the forests to these 

 Tuscan mountains, and so restore the river-systems to their natural state. 

 I came back from Prato to Florence in one of the slow-coach local trains. 

 In the carriage I found a young Italian reading a German book. The sight 

 was sufficiently rare to lead me to seek conversation with my travelling- 

 companion, and he proved to be a very intelligent man, one of the new 

 Italy that is full of hope and gives one's confidence in the race a great lift; 

 keen, clear-minded, with a desire to have his country even with the world. 

 The young Italian, though not a frequent, is a very comfortable, spectacle to 

 those who desire the best future of his people. . . . Farther along I made 

 occasion to have parleys with some of the country folk I met upon the way. 

 They are the deftest people in casual rencontre I have ever seen ; they have 

 an ease in contact with a man of strange nationality that one rarely finds 

 among provincial peoples ; in fact they are less provincial than any folk I 

 ever saw. My Italian is very bad and my looks excessively foreign to this 

 land, yet I never saw my strangeness mirrored in their eyes. I had a tilt in 

 politeness with one old clumsy-looking peasant ; we bowed and exchanged 

 courtesies of grimace in which I did my best, but the ancient rustic went 

 me better in every effort to show mutual consideration, all with the gravity 

 of a Chesterfield. After every day spent with them in the field I come back 

 more convinced that there is a power under the hidebound life of these peo- 

 ple that will yet find its place in the world. 



Above Certosa : 



February 3, 1882. 



The Via Romana clings in the valleys for many miles south of Florence, 

 and most travellers pass through it because of its historic associations, but 

 they rarely take the steep zigzag roads that lead up from the banks of the 

 Arno to the beautiful rolling highlands that lie on either hand. The day I 

 took the road up on to this table-land was one of those when the Tuscan 

 winter lapses into spring. It was still February, but the violets dim and the 

 daffodils, which in England, Shakespeare tells us, "take the winds of March 

 with beauty," were known in earth and air. From a sheltered corner a 

 froward poppy looked out over the wheat-field that was still the soft grassy 

 tangle that precedes the shooting stems. For some days the permanent 



