of the cathedral sharp against the clear, brightening sky. At our last
look the sun was not up, but broad shafts of light, such as painters
throw before the chariot of Phoebus, refracted against the pure æther,
spread like a halo round the threefold pinnacles: a moment more and
Orvieto was hidden behind a higher hill, not to be seen again. All day
we drove among the snow-bound hills and woods, past the Lake of Bolsena
in its forbidding beauty; past small valleys full of naked fruit trees
and shivering olives, which must be nooks of loveliness in spring; past
defiant little towns aloft on their islands of tufa, like Bagnorea with
its single slender bell-tower; past Montefiascone with its good old
story about Cardinal Fugger and the native wine.

[Illustration: CIVITÀ BAGNOREA.]

We stopped to lunch at Viterbo, a town more closely connected with the
history of the Papacy than any except Rome itself, and full of legends
and romantic associations: it is dirty and dilapidated, and has great
need of all its memories. Being but eight miles from Montefiascone, we
called for a bottle of the fatal Est, which we had tasted once at
Augsburg, where the host of the Three Moors has it in his cellar, in
honor perhaps of the departed Fugger family, whose palace has become his
hotel: there we had found it delicious--a wine as sweet as cordial, with
a soul of fire and a penetrating but delicate flavor of its own--how
different from the thin, sour stuff they brought us in the long-necked,
straw-covered flask, nothing to attest its relationship to the generous
juice at the Three Moors except the singular, unique flavor! After this
little disappointment we left Viterbo, and drove on through the same
sort of scenery, which seemed to grow more and more beautiful in the
rosy light of the sinking sun. But it is hard to tell, for nothing makes
a journey so beautiful as to know that Rome is the goal. As the last