spreads a dazzling foreground to valley, hill, and lustrous heaven.  There is orange on the far horizon, and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from the clouds are floating.  Yonder swims an elf with luminous hair astride upon a sea-horse, and followed by a dolphin plunging through the fiery waves.  The orange deepens into dying red.  The green divides into daffodil and beryl.  The blue above grows fainter, and the moon and stars shine stronger.

Through these celestial changes we glide into a landscape fit for Francia and the early Umbrian painters.  Low hills to right and left; suavely modelled heights in the far distance; a very quiet width of plain, with slender trees ascending into the pellucid air; and down in the mystery of the middle distance a glimpse of heaven-reflecting water.  The magic of the moon and stars lends enchantment to this scene.  No painting could convey their influences.  Sometimes both luminaries tremble, all dispersed and broken, on the swirling river.  Sometimes they sleep above the calm cool reaches of a rush-grown mere.  And here and there a ruined turret, with a broken window and a tuft of shrubs upon the rifted battlement, gives value to the fading pallor of the West.  The last phase in the sunset is a change to blue-grey monochrome, faintly silvered with starlight; hills, Tiber, fields and woods, all floating in aerial twilight.  There is no definition of outline now.  The daffodil of the horizon has faded into scarcely perceptible pale greenish yellow.

We have passed Stimigliano.  Through the mystery of darkness we hurry past the bridges of Augustus and the lights of Narni.

THE CASCADES OF TERNI

The Velino is a river of considerable volume which rises in the highest region of the Abruzzi, threads the upland valley of Rieti, and precipitates itself by an artificial channel over cliffs about seven hundred feet in height into the Nera.  The water is densely charged with particles of lime.  This calcareous matter not only tends continually to choke its bed, but clothes the precipices over which the torrent thunders with fantastic drapery of stalactite; and, carried on the wind in foam, incrusts the forests that surround the falls with fine white dust.  These famous cascades are undoubtedly the most sublime and beautiful which Europe boasts; and their situation is worthy of so great a natural wonder.  We reach them through a noble mid-Italian landscape, where the mountain forms are austere and boldly modelled, but the vegetation, both wild and cultivated, has something of the South-Italian richness.  The hillsides are a labyrinth of box and arbutus, with coronilla in golden bloom.  The turf is starred with cyclamens and orchises.  Climbing the staircase paths beside the falls in morning sunlight, or stationed on the points of vantage that command their successive cataracts, we enjoyed a spectacle which might be compared in