acres lying in a wide beautiful plain.  We passed through half a dozen little agricultural villages, mean but picturesque.  None of the splendid prosperity of the cities has penetrated here.  The people in these towns are peasants—­and look it.  They are the peasant people who live in the canvasses of the artists of the Renaissance.  Half a thousand years has not changed them.  Along the dusty roads we passed huge wine-carts.  Two bell-bearing mules tandem gave warning to other passing carts of a cart’s approach.  The driver of the cart was curled up in his shaded seat asleep.  The mules took their way.  Carts passed and repassed each other on the road.  Autos whizzed by.  Still the drivers slept.  They were ragged, frowsy, stupid looking.  They all wore colour, one a crimson belt, another a blue shirt, a third a red handkerchief about his head.  They would make better pictures than citizens, we thought.  In Rome and Genoa the people would make better citizens than pictures.  All day going to Frascatti and coming home we passed these beggarly looking peasant farmers.  At Frascatti, which stands proudly upon a great hill overlooking the Roman plain, we saw the rich acres stretching away for miles toward Rome and beyond it.  Villages flashed in the sun, white and iridescent, and the squares of vineyards and the tall Lombardy poplars made a landscape that rested the eye and soothed the soul.  We stood looking at it for a long time.  With us were some high officials of the Italian government.

“A wonderful landscape,” said Henry to our hosts.

“In all the world there is no match for it,” said Medill.

“It has lain this way for three thousand years, bearing crops year after year!” explained our host.

“Signor,” said a friend of our host, “they tell me that this land yields seven per cent net.”

“Yes,” replied our host.  “I was talking to a man in the agricultural department about it the other day; it really nets seven per cent.”

“What’s this land worth an acre?” This question came from me, who has the Kansas man’s seven devil lust to put a price on land.

“Well—­I don’t—­” Our host looked at his Italian friends.  They gazed, puzzled and bewildered, and consulted one another.  The discussion developed a curious situation.  No one knew the price of that land.  With us, out in the Middle West, a boy learns the probable price of the land in his neighborhood, as soon as he learns the points of the compass.  Finally our host explained:  “The truth of the matter is that this land never has been sold in the memory of living men.  Probably most of it has remained in its present ownership for from three hundred to five hundred years.  No one sells land in Italy.”