a full suit of soft, pale brown contrasting with the dark evergreens.  Among these woods grow all the wild-flowers of the long Roman spring from January to May—­flowers that I never saw in bloom at the same time anywhere else.  On banks overcanopied by faded boughs nodded myriads of snowdrops; farther on we held our horses’ heads well up as they slipped, almost sitting, down the damp rocky clefts of a gorge whose sides were purple with violets, mingling their delicious odor, the sweetest and most sentimental of perfumes, with the fresh, geranium-like scent of the cyclamen, which here and there flung back its delicate pinkish petals like one amazed:  then came acres of anemones—­not our pale wind-shaken flower, but brave asters of half a dozen superb kinds.  Up and down these passes we forced our way through interlacing branches, which drooped too low, until we had crossed the ridges on either side the Cremera, and gained the valley at the head of which is Isola Farnese, the rock-fortress supposed to occupy the site of the citadel of Etruscan Veii.  It is not really an island, in spite of its name; only a bold peninsula, round whose base two rivulets flow and nearly meet.  It is called a village, and so it is, with quite a population, but the great courtyard of the fifteenth-century castle contains them all, and the huts, pig-pens, kennels and coops which they seem to inhabit indiscriminately.  Except where the bluff overlooks the valley, everything is closed and shut in by rocks and gorges, through one of which a lovely waterfall drips from a covert of boughs and shrubbery and wreathing ferns and creepers into a little stream, which with musical clamor rushes at a picturesque old mill:  through another the road from the castle passes through a narrow issue to the outer world.  And this stranded and shipwrecked fortress in the midst of so wild a scene is all that exists to mark where Veii stood, the powerful city which kept Rome at bay for ten years, and fell at length by stratagem!  Its site was forgotten for nearly two thousand years, but in this century the discovery of some tombs revealed the secret.

[Illustration:  Veii, from the Campagna.]

[Illustration:  Tivoli.]

The scenery differs entirely on different sides of Rome.  Here there is not a ruin, not a vestige, except a few low heaps of stone-or brickwork hidden by weeds:  on the other, toward Tivoli, much of the beauty is due to the work of man—­the stately remnants of ancient aqueduct, temple and tomb; the tall square towers of feudal barons, round which cluster low farm-buildings scarcely less old and solid; the vast, gloomy grottoes of Cerbara, which look like the underground palace of a bygone race, but which are the tufa-quarries of classic times; the ruined baths of Zenobia, where the rushing milky waters of the Aquae Albulae fill the air with sulphurous fumes; and, as a climax, the Villa of Hadrian, less a country-place