I do not know why a woman should exhibit an overgrown broomstick when an Italian train passes a flag station, any more than I know why, when a squad of Paris firemen march out of the engine house for exercise, they should carry carbines and knapsacks.  I only know that these things are done.

In Tuscany the vineyards make a fine show, for the vines are trained to grow up from the ground and then are bound into streamers and draped from one fruit tree or one shade tree to another, until a whole hillside becomes one long, confusing vista of leafy festoons.  The thrifty owner gets the benefit of his grapes and of his trees, and of the earth below, too, for there he raises vegetables and grains, and the like.  Like everything else in this land, the system is an old one.  I judge it was old enough to be hackneyed when Horace wrote of it: 

Now each man, basking on his slopes,
Weds to his widowed tree the vine;
Then, as he gayly quaffs his wine,
Salutes thee god of all his hopes.

Classical quotations interspersed here and there are wonderful helps to a guide book, don’t you think?

In rural Italy there are two other scenic details that strike the American as being most curious—­one is the amazing prevalence of family washing, and the other is the amazing scarcity of birdlife.  To himself the traveler says: 

“What becomes of all this intimate and personal display of family apparel I see fluttering from the front windows of every house in this country?  Everybody is forever washing clothes but nobody ever wears it after it is washed.  And what has become of all the birds?”

For the first puzzle there is no key, but the traveler gets the answer to the other when he passes a meat-dealer’s shop in the town and sees spread on the stalls heaps of pitiably small starlings and sparrows and finches exposed for sale.  An Italian will cook and eat anything he can kill that has wings on it, from a cassowary to a katydid.

Thinking this barbarity over, I started to get indignant; but just in time I remembered what we ourselves have done to decimate the canvas-back duck and the wild pigeon and the ricebird and the red-worsted pulse-warmer, and other pleasing wild creatures of the earlier days in America, now practically or wholly extinct.  And I felt that before I could attend to the tomtits in my Italian brother’s eye I must needs pluck a few buffaloes out of my own; so I decided, in view of those things, to collect myself and endeavor to remain perfectly calm.

We came into Venice at the customary hour—­to wit, eleven P.M. —­and had a real treat as our train left the mainland and went gliding far out, seemingly right through the placid Adriatic, to where the beaded lights of Venice showed like a necklace about the withered throat of a long-abandoned bride, waiting in the rags of her moldered wedding finery for a bridegroom who comes not.