as the bustle of the works has subsided, and there is a good hotel-
-the Hotel Airolo. It lies nearly 4000 feet above the sea, so that
even in summer the air is cool. There are plenty of delightful
walks--to Piora, for example, up the Val Canaria, and to Bedretto.

After leaving Airolo the road descends rapidly for a few hundred
feet and then more slowly for four or five kilometres to Piotta.
Here the first signs of the Italian spirit appear in the wood
carving of some of the houses. It is with these houses that I
always consider myself as in Italy again. Then come Ronco on the
mountain side to the left, and Quinto; all the way the pastures are
thickly covered with cowslips, even finer than those that grow on
Salisbury Plain. A few kilometres farther on and sight is caught
of a beautiful green hill with a few natural terraces upon it and a
flat top--rising from amid pastures, and backed by higher hills as
green as itself. On the top of this hill there stands a white
church with an elegant Lombard campanile--the campanile left
unwhitewashed. The whole forms a lovely little bit of landscape
such as some old Venetian painter might have chosen as a background
for a Madonna.

This place is called Prato. After it is passed the road enters at
once upon the Monte Piottino gorge, which is better than the
Devil's Bridge, but not so much to my taste as the auriculas and
rhododendrons which grow upon the rocks that flank it. The peep,
however, at the hamlet of Vigera, caught through the opening of the
gorge, is very nice. Soon after crossing the second of the Monte
Piottino bridges the first chestnuts are reached, or rather were so
till a year ago, when they were all cut down to make room for some
construction in connection with the railway. A couple of