At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere.  He is not so gay, quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many bei bocconi on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine temperament led him to expect.  Do I happen to know, he asks, any American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere?

* * * * *

As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us once as we rode southward from Venice toward Florence on that road from Padua to Ferrara.  It had been May for some time in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad landscape:  fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay cut already, and here and there acres of Indian corn.  The green of the fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the fig-trees hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the slender native grace of vines.  Huge stone farm-houses shelter under the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation the most picturesque peasants,—­men and women, pretty young girls in broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never to have been younger nor fairer.  Country roads, level, straight, and white, stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars escort them wherever they go.  All about, the birds sing, and the butterflies dance.  The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes, at the passing train; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the application of the goad; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm-minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomotive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of Spring.

At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to drink our health—­with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d’Oro, and set forth from the gate of the old city.