are five and a quarter inches square, ten feet long, and at their lower end formed into a truncated cone of three inches diameter, where cut off.  The conical part is covered with iron.  The pestles are ten and a half inches apart in the clear.  They pass through two horizontal beams, which string them, as it were, together, and while the mortises in the beams are so loose, as to let the pestles work vertically, it restrains them to that motion.  There is a mortar of wood, twelve or fifteen inches deep, under each pestle, covered with a board, the hole of which is only large enough to let the pestle pass freely.  There are two arms in the axis for every pestle, so that the pestle gives two strokes for every revolution of the wheel.  Poggio, a muleteer, who passes every week between Vercelli and Genoa, will smuggle a sack of rough rice for me to, Genoa; it being death to export it in that form.  They have good cattle, and in good number, mostly cream-colored; and some middle-sized sheep.  The streams furnish speckled trout.

April 20. Novara.  Buffalora.  Sedriano.  Milan.  From Vercelli to Novara the fields are all in rice, and now mostly under water.  The dams separating the several water-plats or ponds, are set in willow.  At Novara there are some figs in the gardens in situations well protected.  From Novara to the Ticino it is mostly stony and waste, grown up in broom.  From Ticino to Milan it is all in corn.  Among the corn are willows, principally, a good many mulberries, some walnuts, and here and there an almond.  The country still a plain, the soil black and rich, except between Novara and the Ticino, as before mentioned.  There is very fine pasture round Vercelli and Novara to the distance of two miles, within which rice is not permitted.  We cross the Sisto on the same kind of vibrating or pendulum boat as on the Po.  The river is eighty or ninety yards wide; the rope fastened to an island two hundred yards above, and supported by five intermediate canoes.  It is about one and a half inches in diameter.  On these rivers they use a short oar of twelve feet long, the flat end of which is hooped with iron, shooting out a prong at each corner, so that it may be used occasionally as a setting-pole.  There is snow on the Apennines, near Genoa.  They have still another method here of planting the vine.  Along rows of trees, they lash poles from tree to tree.  Between the trees, are set vines, which, passing over the pole, are carried on to the pole of the, next tree, whose vines are in like manner brought to this, and twined together; thus forming the intervals between the rows of trees, alternately, into arbors and open space.  They have another method also of making quick-set hedges.  Willows are planted from one to two feet apart, and interlaced, so that every one is crossed by three or four others.