the Fonte di San Giovanni was the only other feature I could find worth sketching or making a note of; and having seen everything, I took the railway on again to Venice. The views of the Friulan Alps, under which one travels for some distance, are very exquisite. We passed Conegliano, where I once left the railway for a journey through the heart of the Dolomite country to Cortina d'Ampezzo, and, to my regret, hurried past Pordenone, having forgotten that at any rate a tall brick campanile was there, which seemed to promise some reward to the visitor. It is of plain arcaded brickwork below, and the upper stage is slightly battered out with very tall machicoulis, from within the parapet of which a smaller octagonal stage rises, covered with a low spire. The whole composition as one sees it from the railway is unusual and very good, and recalls just a little the campanile of the Palazzo Publico at Siena. Verona to Mantua - Villa Franca Mantua : - its Venice to Verona- OUR gondolier, anxious not to be too late for us in the morning, slept in his gondola beneath our windows, and did his best, when the sun rose, to rouse the sleepy porter of our hotel, but in vain; and at last, when I awoke, I found we should have a very narrow escape, if indeed we did not absolutely lose our train. The thing was, however, to be done, and was done. We shot rapidly-only too rapidly for the last time along the smooth waters on which we had been so pleasantly loitering before, and soon found ourselves at the railway station. Our journey was much like what such journeys usually are: as far as Verona we were only retracing our steps, but now the hot sun had quite cleared. away the clouds which, when we passed before, hid the Tyrolese Alps from our sight, and these, whenever the high acacia hedges which line the railway allowed us a sight of them, made the journey so far beautiful. The names of the engines on this railway are very unlike the kind of nomenclature indulged in at home; we were drawn to Verona, I believe, by the Titian, and saw, as we rushed along, engines named after Dante, Sansovino, and other artistic and literary celebrities. We reached Verona at ten o'clock; the station, however, is so much out of the town, and the day was so intensely hot, that we gave up the idea of again going into it, and, contenting ourselves with the general view of its quaint and picturesque walls rising over the rugged hills which girt the city on its northern side, we sat down to a breakfast of iced lemonade and some of those deliciously light cakes which are never had in such perfection as in Italy, and amused ourselves by watching the way in which the guards and drivers of the train by which we had travelled proceeded to solace themselves with a game at billiards, upon a table provided, I suppose, by the very considerate directors of the railway company. The railway from Verona to Mantua crosses a country which is thoroughly uninteresting in point of scenery; it carried us on well into the great plain of Lombardy, rich, teemingly rich, in its produce, but flat, arid, and sultry to a degree. This was altogether one of our hottest days, and took us fairly into a kind of district in which the heat is most oppressively felt. On the road we passed Villa Franca, a small town which has a rather striking castle, with battlemented walls and a good many square towers, still very fairly perfect; the whole built in brick, and with battlements finished square at the top, and not forked like those at Verona. We reached the station at Mantua by twelve o'clock, but, as this was very far from the city, it was nearly an hour later before we were fairly landed at one--I forget whichof the abominably dirty and bad inns to which sojourners |