Leri, which Cavour looked upon henceforth as his true home, lies in one of the ugliest parts of the plains of Piedmont, cold in winter, scorched by a burning sun in summer, and unhealthy from the exhalations of the rice-fields which contribute to its wealth.  Except that game was tolerably plentiful, it had none of the attractions of an English country-seat—­the smiling hillside, the ancestral elms, the park, the garden.  Cavour led the simplest life; the old housekeeper who cooked the dinner also placed it on the table.  But the fare, if plain, was abundant, and Cavour was delighted to entertain his friends and neighbours, who found him the most affable of hosts, inexhaustibly good-tempered, a patient listener, a talker abounding in wit and wisdom.  He had the art of adapting himself perfectly to the society in which he moved, but in one thing he was always the same:  wherever he went he carried his intense vitality—­that quality of entrain which persuades more than eloquence or earnestness.  He induced others to join him in experiments which were then innovations:  steam-mills, factories for artificial manures and the like, while the machinery and new methods introduced at Leri revolutionised farming in Piedmont.  One great scheme planned by him, an irrigatory canal between the Ticino and the Po, was only finished after his death, as the most worthy tribute to his memory.  He rose at four, went to see his cattle, stood in the broiling harvest fields to overlook the reapers, acted, in short, as his own bailiff, and to these habits he returned in later years, whenever he had time to visit Leri.  Cavour’s mind was not poetic; we hear of his admiring only one poet, Shakespeare, but in Shakespeare it was probably the deep knowledge of man that attracted him, the apprehension of how men with given passions must act under given conditions.  He did not, therefore, see country pursuits from a poet’s standpoint, but he appreciated their power of calming men’s minds, of dissipating the fog of unrealities, of tending towards what Kant called, in a phrase he quoted with approval, “practical reason.”  He considered, also, that nothing can so assure the stability of a nation as an intelligent interest shared by a large portion of its citizens in the cultivation of the soil.  The English country gentleman who divided his time between his duties in Parliament and those not less obligatory on his estates was in Cavour’s eyes an almost ideal personage.  It should be added that Cavour could not understand a country life which did not embrace solicitude for the worker.  The true agriculturist gained the confidence of the poor around him; it was, he said, so easy to gain it.  He was kindly, thoughtful, and just in his treatment of his dependents, and he always retained his hold on their affections; when Italy was asking what she should do without her great statesman, the sorrowing peasants of Leri asked in tears what they should do without their master?