SPART1VENTO AGAIN ci 



Unhappily these letters are not only the last, but the series is 

 quite imperfect ; and this is the more to be lamented as he had 

 now begun to use a pen more skilfully, and in the following 

 notes there is at times a touch of real distinction in the 



manner. 



Cagliari : October 5, 1860. 



c 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. Sparti- 

 vento 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 

 Bakiana 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 



