this golden hillock, I inquired softly:

"From the cow?"

"From the cow."

"Whom does one bribe?"

He enjoyed a special dispensation, he declared--he need not bribe.
Returned from Albania with shattered health, he had been sent hither to
recuperate. He required not only butter, but meat on meatless days, as
well as a great deal of rest; he was badly run down.... And eggs, raw
eggs, drinking eggs; ten a day, he vows, is his minimum. Enviable
convalescent!

The afternoon being clear and balmy, he took me for a walk, smoking
cigarettes innumerable. We wandered up to that old convent picturesquely
perched against the slope of the hill and down again, across the
rivulet, to the inevitable castle-ruin overhanging the sea. Like all
places along this shore, Levanto lies in a kind of amphitheatre, at a
spot where one or more streams, descending from the mountains, discharge
themselves into the sea. Many of these watercourses may in former times
have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now
obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea
further out, with silt swept down from the uplands. The same thing has
struck me in England--at Lyme Regis, for instance, whose river was also
once navigable to small craft and at Seaton, about a mile up whose
stream stands that village--I forget its name--which was evidently the
old port of the district in pre-Seaton days. Local antiquarians will
have attacked these problems long ago. The sea may have receded.