I confess that I like posting.  There is a freedom and a fine sense of proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient speed, which you do not feel on the railroad.  For twenty francs and buonamano, I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape with a cumulative feeling of ownership in everything I saw.  For me, old women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle, flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved back and forth under orchard trees.  For me, the peasants toiled in the fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons, or red caps.  The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more about the cottage doors, on account of our posting.  As for the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its guardian poplars,—­I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so much of these things as we.  Certainly they could not have had all to themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping villages, taking the street from everybody, and fading magnificently away upon the road.

III.

TRIESTE.

If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six o’clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter the broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft.  The hills are bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along their sides.  The prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing features, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons.  While it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much as possible.  But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic.  They station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when he feels the first breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away, and cling to it till the wind falls.  This may happen in three days or in nine, according to the popular proverbs.  “The spectacle of the sea,” says Dall’ Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, “while the Bora blows, is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills is delightful.  The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in the heart of winter.”