A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 251 



to the wants and necessities of our modern industrial 

 and commercial system. They are towns that have grown 

 up in a state of profound peace, and that imply advanced 

 means of communication, with a free interchange of 

 agricultural and manufactured products. 



Hence in America it is always quite easy to see at a 

 glance the raison d'etre of every town or village one comes 

 across. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore 

 New Orleans, Montreal, San Francisco, Charleston- 

 are all great ports for the exportation of corn, pork, 

 'lumber,' cotton, or tobacco, and the importation of 

 European manufactured goods. Chicago is the main 

 collecting and distributing centre for the wide basin of 

 the upper Great Lakes, as Cincinnati is for the Ohio 

 Valley, and St. Louis for the Mississippi and Missouri 

 confluents. Pittsburg bases itself upon its coal and its 

 iron; Buffalo exists as the point of transfer where 

 elevators raise the corn of Chicago from lake-going 

 vessels into the long, low barges of the Erie Canal. In 

 every case, in that newest of worlds, one can see for one- 

 self at a glance exactly why so large a body of human 

 beings has collected just at that precise spot, and at no 

 other. 



But when you have toiled up, hot and breathless, 

 through olive and pine, from the Viale at Florence to the 

 antique Cyclopean walls of Etruscan Fassulae, you 

 wonder to yourself, like our American friend, as you pant 

 on the terrace of the Eomanesque cathedral, what on 

 earth they could ever have wanted to build a town up 

 there for, anyway. 



If we look away from Tuscany to our own England, 



