The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had been so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields by the richness of its soil.  The top of the wall had been leveled, and planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of such mediaeval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little military life did not still linger about a bastion here and there.  From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that the only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grossetto for the excellent shooting in the marshes.  All the way to Florence we continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto overflowed with abundance of game.  On the kitchen floor and in the court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great, noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled, and roasted.  We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond them.  He was part of the repairs and improvements which that hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with the four-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel, Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the iron stove in the small one.  He had nothing, evidently, in common with the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with great fire-places.  He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know what beefsteak was.  When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded, “Bifsteca di manzo, o bifsteca di motone?”—­“Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mutton?”

Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I heard singing after dark in the streets,—­

  “Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!”

The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of forza maggiore, as the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing us damages for our overturn into the river.  It was in the early part of the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more or less interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu de la Drome,—­the only reliable prophet France has produced since Voltaire;—­and if our accident was caused by an overruling Providence, the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not responsible.  To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but on the other hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause the inundation.  And, in fine, although we could not have travelled by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the diligence at Civita Vecchia.