is a golden haze hanging over the plain, and glints as of living flame
on the flanks of the mountains. From all sides crowds are pressing
toward Lucca. Before six o'clock every high-road is alive. Down from
the highest mountain-top of Pizzorna, overlooking Florence and its
vine-garlanded campagna, comes the hermit, brown-draped, in hood and
mantle; staff in hand, he trudges along the dusty road. And down,
too, from his native lair among the pigs and the poultry, comes the
black-eyed, black-skinned, matted-haired urchin, who makes mud pies
under the tufted ilex-trees at Ponte a Moriano, and swears at the
hermit.

They come! they come! From mountain-sides bordering the broad road
along the Serchio--mountains dotted with bright homesteads, each
gleaming out of its own cypress-grove, olive-patch, canebrake, and
vine-arbor, under which the children play--they come from solitary
hovels, hung up, as it were, in mid-air, over gloomy ravines, scored
and furrowed with red earth, down which dark torrents dash and spray.

They come! they come! these Tuscan peasants, a trifle too fond of
holiday-keeping, like their betters--but what would you have? The land
is fertile, and corn and wine and oil and rosy flowering almonds grow
almost as of themselves. They come--tens and tens of miles away, from
out the deep shadows of primeval chestnut-woods, clothing the flanks
of rugged Apennines with emerald draperies. They come--through parting
rocks, bordering nameless streams--cool, delicious waters, over which
bend fig, peach, and plum, delicate ferns and unknown flowers. They
come--from hamlets and little burghs, gathered beside lush pastures,
where tiny rivulets trickle over fresh turf and fragrant herbs,
lulling the ear with softest echoes.