degree abated, and leaving Bergine, where the peasants were feasting
before their doors, in their holiday dresses, with red pinks stuck in
their ears instead of rings, and their necks surrounded with coral of
the same colour, we came through a woody valley to the banks of a
lake, filled with the purest and most transparent water, which loses
itself in shady creeks, amongst hills robed with verdure from their
bases to their summits.

The shores present one continual shrubbery, interspersed with knots
of larches and slender almonds, starting from the underwood. A
cornice of rock runs round the whole, except where the trees descend
to the very brink, and dip their boughs in the water.

It was five o'clock when I caught the sight of this unsuspected lake,
and the evening shadows stretched nearly across it. Gaining a very
rapid ascent, we looked down upon its placid bosom, and saw several
airy peaks rising above the tufted foliage of the groves around. I
quitted the contemplation of them with regret, and, in a few hours,
arrived at Borgo di Volsugano, the scenes of the lake still present
before the eye of my fancy.

July 31st.--My heart beat quick when I saw some hills, not very
distant, which I was told lay in the Venetian State, and I thought an
age, at least, had elapsed before we were passing their base. The
road was never formed to delight an impatient traveller; loose
pebbles and rolling stones render it, in the highest degree, tedious
and jolting. I should not have spared my execrations, had it not
traversed a picturesque valley, overgrown with juniper, and strewed
with fragments of rock, precipitated, long since, from the
surrounding eminences, blooming with cyclamens.