frogs keep up an incessant cry, tremulous
and guttural; and now and then one of
them splashes luxuriously into the cool
water beneath the shadow of the bank.
The cicala, in his bronze coat of mail,
sends forth a shrill sound, like the springing
of an infinitely tiny rattle made of the
finest steel. It seems to be to the ear what
the hot quivering of the air is to the eye,
and to be equally suggestive of sunshine.
Swarms of coloured butterflies flutter
brightly around. Orange, crimson, blue,
white, purple, yellow—if a rainbow could
fall from the sky, and be scattered into a
thousand fragments as it fell, it could
shower down no bright tint these winged
flowers would fail to match.

On the dry, dusty, crumbling paths that
climb the hills bounding the valleys, the
light beats fiercely. The grass is parched
and sparsely grown, and dry. Here and
there glitters a bunch of glaring yellow
weeds, made bold and flaunting by the
munificent sun, like a coarse favourite of
fortune. Little cold bright-eyed lizards glide
in and out of the chinks in the rough stone
walls that flank the main roads. Some of
the lizards are as green as emeralds. Others,
again, are of the same hue as the brownest
of the blocks of stone. Sometimes they will
remain as motionless as the stone itself,
gazing with their round, unwinking, black
diamonds of eyes, until the passer-by might
think that they were hardened and baked
stiff and stony by the heat. But suddenly,
at some sound or sight which startles it—
or, it may be, from pure caprice—the little
reptile flits away as swift and noiseless as a
flash of light, and is gone.

Over the top of the wall tumbles a laden
branch of roses, or the starry clematis.
The wheat is high, and the green vines,
full of leaf, hang richly on the pollard
mulberry-stems. The grey olive stands up
to his middle in a sea of grain. The corn
and wine and oil all grow together on the
same fertile field. Everything is steeped in
sunlight. Only the olive's silvery foliage
conveys a thought of coolness. It is always
a moonlight tree. In the sultriest summer
noontide, its soft grey tint, and the fantastic
weirdness of its shadowy form (especially
in the older trees, which have been scooped
and cut until nothing but a seemingly
unsubstantial shell of trunk remains to
them), and the trembling, feathery plume
of branches, recal the cold bright pallor of
the moon, that makes the shuddering
flowers so wan and bloomless when the
night breeze ruffles their dewy breasts.

Drought and a sultry silence, which the
cicala's cry seems but to emphasise, not
break, prevail along the dusty road, as we
wander along the Ema's course, further and
still further away from the fair city of
Florence, going eastward. Presently, with many
a labouring creak and jar, comes lumbering
by, a clumsy country cart, drawn by two
of the colossal, dove-coloured Tuscan oxen.
The driver—or he who should be driving,
rather—lies asleep under a shady awning
of matting at the bottom of his rude
vehicle. The cart is one which might have
been copied inch for inch from a Roman
bas-relief, and has been copied through a
long series of models from the cart that bore
home the produce of the teeming Italian soil
in Horace's day. The docile heavy beasts
that draw it, turn their grand dark eyes
askance upon the passenger as they meet
him, and blow a fragrant breath from moist,
ample nostrils.

Following the windings of the road,
which now runs for a short space on the
level, close to the Ema, we come to a
steep ascent on the right, leading up to
the summit of one of the highest
eminences overlooking the valley. Instead
of sloping gently down towards the river,
as most of the neighbouring hills do, this
one terminates on the side of the Ema
in an abrupt precipice. The steep ascent
before mentioned leaves the main highway
to climb this height. The road is narrow,
strewn thickly with great smooth pebbles,
like the bed of a torrent, and only kept
from crumbling bodily down into the valley
in summer, or being washed away by the
rain in winter, by horizontal lines of rough
stone paving, placed like the rungs of a
ladder, which succeed each other at wide
intervals, and afford a foothold to any laden
mule that may be driven up or down.
To wheels, the road is quite inaccessible.
Arrived on the summit, it turns abruptly
to the left between high stone walls, within
which the soil is so much higher than the
road—a common circumstance in Tuscan
farms—that the corn and wild flowers
peep over the top of the wall, and the olives
and fruit-trees rear nearly their whole
height above it. The walls and the foliage
shut out all glimpse of the view to right or
left; but presently we come to an open
space, a little piazzetta, and the wide
landscape bursts upon us. It is so bright and
airy and unexpected, that we feel as though
we had come out of a dark room into the
daylight. We are on the topmost ridge of
a line of hills that slope down on either