The city was never so fair before, nor could ever have been so hard to leave; and at the last moment the landlord of the Hotel Washington must needs add a supreme pang by developing into a poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy he had written.  The reader who has received at parting from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his “Ode on the Steam Elevator,” will conceive of the shame and regret with which I thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of having stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board, and for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired.  Let me do him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d’Oro at Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very sprightly.  It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim.

Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these are perfectly good everywhere else in Italy.  The Papal city makes her influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and her management seems to prevail on this railway.  A glance into the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class,—­which in themselves were bad,—­and we took our places almost contentedly.

The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever.  The land was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there sparsely wooded with oaks.  Under these, hogs were feeding upon the acorns, and the wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their roots.  In some places the forest was quite dense; in other places it fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we rushed by.  As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the gloomy expanse of the Campagna.

The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks, though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the rock on which it was built.  Fancy now loves to climb that steep acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and certainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with the monastery would have been.  Two Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the place, and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it was out of sight.  What gentle and pleasant men