The eighth of this month was the anniversary of the birth of the Virgin,
and the celebration, if such it might be called, commenced the evening
before, It is the custom, and Heaven only knows how it originated, for
the people of the lower class to go through the streets in a company,
blowing little penny whistles. We were walking that night in the
direction of the Duomo, when we met a band of these men, blowing with
all their might on the shrill whistles, so that the whole neighborhood
resounded with one continual, piercing, ear-splitting shriek. They
marched in a kind of quick trot through the streets, followed by a crowd
of boys, and varying the noise occasionally by shouts and howls of the
most horrible character. They paraded through all the principal streets
of the city, which for an hour sent up such an agonizing scream that you
might have fancied it an enormous monster, expiring in great torment.
The people seemed to take the whole thing as a matter of course, but it
was to us a novel manner of ushering in a religious festival.

The sky was clear and blue, as it always is in this Italian paradise,
when we left Florence a few days ago for Fiesole. In spite of many
virtuous efforts to rise early, it was nine o'clock before we left the
Porta San Gallo, with its triumphal arch to the Emperor Francis,
striding the road to Bologna. We passed through the public walk at this
end of the city, and followed the road to Fiesole along the dried-up bed
of a mountain torrent. The dwellings of the Florentine nobility occupy
the whole slope, surrounded with rich and lovely gardens. The mountain
and plain are both covered with luxuriant olive orchards, whose foliage
of silver gray gives the scene the look of a moonlight landscape.

At the base of the mountain of Fiesole we passed one of the summer
palaces of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and a little distance beyond, took a
foot-path overshadowed by magnificent cypresses, between whose dark
trunks we looked down on the lovely Val d'Arno. But I will reserve all
description of the view till we arrive at the summit.

The modern village of Fiesole occupies the site of an ancient city,
generally supposed to be of Etrurian origin. Just above, on one of the
peaks of the mountain, stands the Acropolis, formerly used as a
fortress, but now untenanted save by a few monks. From the side of its
walls, beneath the shade of a few cypresses, there is a magnificent view
of the whole of Val d'Arno, w