RAILWAY TALK AND CARNIVAL

STUDIES.

GENOA.

E arrived last evening at eight o'clock, having left Turin at two in the afternoon. Although there was snow at Turin, the country lost its wintry look very soon, and the air grew soft

and balmy. Piedmont

- Pied de monte, foot of the mountain lay spread out before us; we almost fancied we could see these vast plains between the Alps and Apennines, stretching from their mountain frontiers far across Lombardy to the Adriatic, their mistress; for though the western and southwestern shores are washed by the Mediterranean, their waters are all sent to the Venetian Sea.

The journey between Turin and Genoa was very pleasant. The rest which I had taken in Turin refreshed me, and made me strong enough to notice and enjoy this new landscape, which differs very much in all its points from Swiss scenery. The color of the sky first struck me. Its mellow amber hue is so unlike the cold transparent stony blue of the Alpine heavens. Then the buildings are novel. I had grown familiar in Switzerland with the heavy turreted tops of the grim Middle Age chateaux and the gray stone churches, whose massive, four-sided spires, with ogive openings, seemed part and parcel of the mountains from whose sides they jutted out.

The Italian campaniles, or bell towers, are the first buildings which attract attention on these Plains of Piedmont. The Lombards, in adopting the Basilica of Latin architecture, did not lose sight of this graceful accessory. They seemed to have enjoyed the picturesque effect these campaniles and the baptisteries produced when grouped around their churches; for they displayed so much architectural taste in them. These beautiful towers run gracefully up against the soft sky, several stories in height, each story often bearing a different order of architecture; the rich-hued heavens peep through the many-arched, airylooking belfry-tops, these sweet warders and gentle guards of the churches, beside which they stand, and they differ widely as well as pleasantly from the frowning towers of old Lombardy castles, which bristle out from many an Alpine crest, whose heavy machicolations and sharp turrets of inverted triangles tell of the fierce times when Guelph and Ghibelline warred hotly against each other.

"This landscape is very gentle and gracious," remarked Venitia. "It is quite a relief to my eyes, after having looked so long on rugged Alps, with their torrents and glaciers and dense forests."

"The garden of Europe," I said, half to myself, as I leaned back in the comfortably stuffed seat of the railway carriage.

"A garden it is truly," answered Janet, "but one that has been nourished with precious human blood. This little kingdom of Piedmont, or Sardinia, has grown on what kills other and larger governments, politics and war; in this it resembles Prussia. Two great men erected their inheritances into kingdoms through the force of their individual will and courage about the same period、 Frederick the Great, of Prussia, that prosaic, wondrous

hero, as Heine calls him, and Victor Amadeus II. of Savoy, both princes, too, struggling against one common enemy, - Austria. This very north of Italy was then the scene of the same struggle which is now going on, Piedmont against Austria, with France for her ally and kinsman; for a royal marriage then sealed the treaty between Louis XIV. and Victor Amadeus, as it is going to do now between the French Emperor and Victor Emanuel. Louis's grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne, you know, married a daughter of the aspiring Savoisien DukeKing.

"France her kinsman!" I repeated. "Yes, you are right. The questionable fidelity and friendly tyranny which France has always shown Savoy and Piedmont is very like that which a strong and powerful kinsman is apt to show a weaker relative. But the first part of your remarks recalls to me a fine expression of De Mazade, you will remember it. He says, 'this Plain of Piedmont has had the fatal privilege of being the champclos* of European duels."

"Every spot

"That is very true," assented Janet. here has been trampled under foot with war-steeds; every clump of grass and every leaf on the trees should be blood-red instead of green. All these towns we have been travelling through during the last two or three days have names which bristle with warlike memories as with spears. Conquered and reconquered Susa, besieged Turin, both tell the same old story of European antagonisms, rival struggles, and Italian yearnings after liberty."

"Which yearnings," I added, "generally resolve themselves, so far as true national or governmental liberty is

concerned, into a sonnet, a written tragedy, or an epic. From Dante to the present day, all their poets have moaned over, 'in deathless verse,' the oppressions and wrongs endured by this geographical expression,' as Metternich pertly called Italy."

"The Italians, it is true," replied Janet, laughing, "have always believed everything could be said in verse, and, as I think of it, I remember that one of the noted Italian poets of the present day, a Piedmontese, too, by the way, has actually written a poem, in which he has celebrated the Piedmontese statutes, the two Chambers of Deputies, and the Constitutional laws, - just fancy the droll air of such an epic!"

We sat silent for a little while, when suddenly Venitia exclaimed,

"O Jennie, do you remember that famous journey we made last year, coming from Paris to Switzerland, when we passed through the vast plains of Franche Comté, that golden Burgundy, the rich Côte d'Or, with its sweet flowering vineyards which filled the air with fragrance? for it was in early June, you know. You remind me of that delightful journey, for, just as you have been doing now, you and Ottilie mingled with the subtle odor of the grape-flower your memories of the past. You showered down a flood of names and a stream of historic story as brilliant in its flow as the precious Burgundian wine. But I remember it poured black and dark with that bad Philip, the greatest duke in all the world,' the one whom history calls Good,' notwithstanding the cruel wrong he did to his poor orphan niece, Jacqueline of Holland,

'She whom they called queen

In Brabant once.""

"Yes," answered Janet, smiling, "we went over the whole Burgundian line from Philip the Bold down to Charles the Bold, and his chronicler De Commines; then when we came to that great struggle of ducal pride and state ambition warring with the general power, that never-ending sphinx riddle for countries, Ottilie and I had a grand argument, I remember."

"But I did not follow you through those political historical disputes," said Venitia. I got no further than poor Jacqueline, as Owen Meredith sings:

'Alas, it was a piteous history,

The life of that poor countess! ·

Wrongs, insults, treacheries,

Hopes broken down, and memory which sighed

In, like a night-wind.'"

"It is very hard,” said Janet, laughing, "to make you enthusiastic young persons accept those great facts which history establishes; namely, that there are some rights which are perfectly just in themselves and yet seem politically impossible, and some concessions which are not only humiliating, but cruel, that seem politically necessary."

"Venitia must accept them," I remarked. "If she does not now, her life experience, I fancy, will teach them to her; for they are proved, not only in the history of nations, but in the history of every woman.”

"It is not so pleasant to learn them from experience," said Janet, pressing my hand tenderly. "There is a sort of aerial perspective hanging around historical wrongs which makes them less painful to regard than personal ones. The distance of time prevents us from seeing and feeling all the detail of suffering caused by these wicked political necessities and impossibilities; it enables us also