A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY



Slowly, reluctantly (rather like a _vers libre_ poem) the quaint
little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform each of the
_fiacre_ drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and tries to outring the
others. You step from the railway carriage--and instantly the hellish
din of those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your
eye has caught the superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag.
Over the sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above
the rugged scarp where the blue-bloused _ouvriers_ are quarrying the
famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the Palazzio
Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo eddies down
your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... At last you are in
Strychnine.

Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, unrhapsodied by press
agents--there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far and
untravelled corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an
unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous among
physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The sorrowful
ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B.V.D. _Chemise de fer_ (with
innumerable examinations of luggage), while it has kept out the
contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly interdicted, has also kept
away the rich and garrulous tourist. But he who will endure to the end
that tortuous journey among flat fields of rye and parsimony, will find
himself well rewarded. The long tunnel through Mondragone ends at
length, and you find yourself on the platform with the droschky bells